When your bandmate calls at 2 a.m. and proposes you should lie naked on the beach together in your new music video, one of two things will happen: Either you’ll need to find yourself a new band, or things are about to get weird with your current one. Fortunately, the Brazen Youth understand the cost of a breathtaking visual aesthetic — and the appropriate times to wear underwear.
“We’re infatuated with image; I think every song we write is subconsciously written with some sort of visual already behind it,” pianist Charles Dahlke explains of the band’s creative process. Thus, when vocalist and guitarist Nick Lussier answered his bandmate’s frenzied late-night call, their naked vision came to fruition in their music video for “You’ll Be Forever Nameless (Pts. 1&2).”
Just because a young band has a snazzy music video doesn’t mean that they’re any good — conversely, remember when Nemes made a sick sign language music video for only $7? — but it certainly never hurts, either. For the Connecticut alt-indie pair, the video for “You’ll Be Forever Nameless (Pts. 1&2)” needed to look like nothing less than a Wes Anderson film. Filming at 5 a.m. on the shore of Rocky Neck State Park in Niantic on a Sunday in September, the duo succeeds with deliberately nuanced colors.
Lussier and Dahlke worked with filmmakers Josiah Tate Burns and Dan Fish on the mini-film, working sweeping shots of the coast and stunning aerials of the two floating in the ocean dead-man style into the mature framework of the video.
“It was very rewarding to work with both of them — as they’re both professionals and posses a deeper understanding of the capabilities of film than Charlie and I do,” Lussier says. “Within this film, we were attempting to capture the timeless essence of nature in an intertwinement with the vulnerability and desperation that comes with the tragedy of loving.”
The two-part song is from the pair’s forthcoming album The Ever Dying Bristlecone Man, due out at the end of the month.
“This was one of our favorite songs off the new album and I think that’s because of how visual it is,” Dahlke adds. “[This] isn’t one of those songs you love because of the way it sounds, but because of the place it puts you in and the emotion it provokes.”
Check out the video below and then be thankful your bandmates didn’t make you strip at 5 a.m. for your last video.