If you feel like all hope is lost, if your ambitions are destroyed, if you’re on the verge of relinquishing your dreams and succumbing to the humdrum slog of a unfulfilling 9-5, then the latest single from New Zealand psyche-powerpop band the Phoenix Foundation should gently push you towards all of your greatest fears.
The title track from Give Up Your Dreams, a song built around a rapturous melody at odds with its defeated lyrics (“I’m a loser and I’m losing my belief”), now comes backed by a video, which stars fellow Kiwi Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords. The video – a homage to the work of Soviet film-maker Andrei Tarkovsky – shows the actor digging himself a deep hole, jumping into said hole and awaking in a different state, as if liberated by the freedom of coming to terms with the loss of his creative drive.
“I like the ambiguity of watching someone dig a very deep hole. Is he burying something (his dreams)? Or is he digging a grave? Or is he digging a tunnel to somewhere? I think there is something compelling about watching him get incrementally more exhausted as he gets deeper and deeper into the earth,” says the video’s director, Loren Taylor.
“At the point of utter fatigue and despair he cracks open and falls into the infinite/space/void/a portal to another realm – and wakes reborn where he started, but with a new perspective. It’s a long song, and it felt like it needed an action that slowly evolved over the minutes, and digging has a lovely percussive rhythm to cut with – or against.”
Watch the video below and let us know your thoughts.
- Give Up Your Dreams is out now on Memphis Industries and The Phoenix Foundation tour the UK later this year
