Lee Ranaldo has recently released a new video for “New Thing” featuring Sharon Van Etten, who will be contributing vocals to five other songs on the album. This follows the announcement of a new album Electric Trim, that will be released in September.
The video was directed by Naomi Yang. Along with the piano and electronic mix, the video starts with the artist opening the lid of an object. As the music starts playing and the artist starts singing, colors of the rainbow start flashing. As the colors continue flashing, the artist reacts in different ways to the light. Along with that, there are scenes of the object, which may be a computer, and other electronics having the same rainbow colors and has the title “NEW THINGS”. There are also scenes of the artist walking around the city, stores and the subways, etc., looking at the screen. The video can be watched below.
According to Stereogum, Ranaldo has said “I’ve described ‘New Thing’ as ‘my song about the Internet’ — about our thousands of ‘friends’ and the obsession with accumulating ‘likes’. When Naomi and I began discussing ideas for the video we knew we wanted to reference that subject matter but didn’t want to do so in any heavy-handed way. I told her I’d like to be a character of some sort rather than ‘guy singing with guitar’ and she found ‘Buster,’ as we dubbed the JVC 3100R ‘Television/Radio Pyramid Capsule Unit’ on eBay. You wouldn’t believe what a cool old useless piece of outdated technology like that sells for these days!”
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