When Matthew Connor released his hauntingly gorgeous album Farewell Motel back in October 2014, the Boston crooner’s soft baritone voice checked into our headspaces — and never left. Now, as he prepares his new EP, Night After Night, due August 26 [Update: Listen to it in full here], Connor has unveiled the slinky, electronic-kissed title track, a song that finds himself vacating the lounges of his past efforts and stalking deeper into the seedier backrooms and basements inhabited by the truly untrustworthy.
As we’ve grown accustomed to by now, Connor’s voice and music are able to tell incredible stories on their own dueling merit, with a stirring ability to transport the listener into his environment and lead along at his fidgety whims. But this week, Connor one-ups his usual audio effort by also supplying visuals for his stark storytelling. The music video for the seductive, gently pulsating “Night After Night”, which was premiered recently by OUT Magazine, was directed and edited by the musician himself, and was inspired by a flirtation with autonomous sensory meridian response.
“Last summer I fell into a weird YouTube K-hole,” Connor tells Vanyaland. “I was having trouble sleeping and wondered if ASMR videos might help. They didn’t give me the tingly sensation some people report experiencing, and they weren’t even especially soothing, but I was really intrigued by the heightened gender performance and telegraphed intimacy of it all. I remember watching one specific video with headphones on, in which a woman was whispering into a microphone and role-playing that she was giving a haircut, and I had the unsettling feeling that she was actually in the room with me, or like she was going to come crawling out of my iPhone like the girl in The Ring or something. And thus, a music video was born.”
We suspect there might be more to this story, but we’ll let the video tell the tale. Watch it below, and listen to the track — one that we’re likely to have on repeat for the foreseeable future — via his Bandcamp page.
UPDATE August 26, 4:34 p.m.: With the new EP out today, the record release party has also been announced: It goes down October 20 at ONCE in Somerville, with St. Nothing and others. Advance tickets available here.