Australian-based Jazz band Hiatus Kaiyote has released their new track “Red Room,” which will be featured on their forthcoming album Mood Valiant. The album is scheduled to be out June 25 under Brainfeeder Records/ Ninja Tune. A music video for their new track has also been released.
Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Red Room” is a slower-paced jazz-soul track that contains simple yet incredibly strong lyrics. “I got a red room/ It is the red hour when the sun sets in my bedroom/ It feels like I’m inside a flower/ It feels like I’m inside my eyelids/ And I don’t wanna be/ Anywhere but here/ I don’t wanna be/ Anywhere but here.” These lyrics are repeated throughout the entire track but still hold a lot of emotion.
“My vocal booth had a red light in it, and I was thinking about my old house that had all this red-colored glass in it. When the sun set in my room at a certain hour, my whole room was red,” said lead vocalist Naomi Saalfield in a press release.
Perrin Moss, the drummer for the band, added, “Essentially it was just having fun, man. We were warm, we were in another country. Of course, not knowing there was a big pandemic coming, the context of the ‘red room’ now and what that means to everyone sitting in isolation is kind of relevant.”
The music video that was released alongside it, which was directed by Tré Koch, matches the simplicity of the song. The band is shown in surrounding a white car, which is placed in a red room, that has “mood valiant” written all over it. Throughout the entire video, Saalfield performs the song while sitting inside and on top of the car.
Saalfield commented on the meaning behind the music video by stating, “My mother had two Valiant station wagons, iconic, vintage Aussie cars. One was white and one was black. And depending on what mood she was in, she would drive one or the other. She was a single mother with six kids: if she drove the black one, you knew not to fuck with her.”
Mood Valiant will be Hiatus Kaiyote’s most recent album since their 2015 LP release Choose Your Weapon. The band originally was scheduled to perform at the Hollywood Bowl on September 9 of last year but due to the ongoing pandemic, the show never actually took place.
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