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Kingsley Flood raise up their flares in new video, crash Aloft Hotel, prepare for Newport Folk

Kingsley Flood are on a folking roll. Last week the high-flying Boston roots act premiered a new music video via NPR, and this week they’re busy warming up for their Newport Folk Festival debut Friday afternoon on the main Fort Stage. Part of that warm-up includes crashing the previously-innocent town of Lexington, Massachusetts, tomorrow night, July 24, for Paste Magazine’s Aloft Hotels series (which is free with RSVP, and you can do that here).

Meanwhile, the video for “Sigh A While” is gaining a bit of due attention. No, not for the fact that this is the second consecutive summer where Kingsley Flood have released a video with snow prominently featured in the background (last July it was “I Don’t Wanna Go Home;” seriously what gives?) but more because of the clip’s striking visuals and deep meaning behind it. Frontman Naseem Khuri told NPR that the song is about failures in life, and so director Christopher Cannucciari connected that idea to the symbolism of an emergency road flare. In the continuous, single-frame music video, a series of car accidents on a snowy country road leads each band member out into the street, bloodied and bruised, holding up flares that’s both designed to warn oncoming traffic but also declare personal defeat.

The crew shot the video over the course of one day up in southern New Hampshire, running through more than 140 flares in the process and eventually scouring the region’s hardware stores for necessary extras. It was harder than anticipated.

Just as dusk approached and daylight appeared to be running out, Mother Nature must have said “Sun Gonna Let Me Shine,” because they snuck in two more takes and ended up using the second-to-last shot. Somewhere along the line, apparently, Khuri burned his wrist on a flare and still has the scar.

And that, my friends, is why the Kingsleys call their new record Battles. This shit ain’t easy.

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