Premiere: The Line – Heads (Matching Heartache With Hard Work)
Premiere: The Line – Heads (Matching Heartache With Hard Work)
In a new, chaotic video the inner turmoil of a paranoid soul is laid bare.
Brian Dillon aka The Line dropped his debut album ‘Matter’ earlier this year via Bad Soup Records. Having already shared releases such as ‘qwasi’, ‘Tribal Dance’ and ‘SSMMUTT’, it’s represents another stellar record for the Dublin label.
Dillon’s new solo project is a modern take on the Irish singer-songwriter tradition, consisting of sparse, emotionally bare songs, layered with ambience, noise and mind-bending soundscapes. The subsequent project reflects his desire to explore human emotion through experimentation with noise.
The second visuals shared from his debut album for the single ‘Heads (Matching Heartache With Hard Work)’ are unsettling and suffocating. They highlight The Line’s ability to create synthetic sounds that evoke powerful emotions.
The dark, almost morbid video directed by Alexander Kuribayashi sees the paranoid, lonely member of a Faculty’s Golf Society rewind to the moment it all went wrong. The record’s glitchy style soundtracks the tearing apart of the main character’s false reality as he yearns for acceptance in a dimly lit bar.
It’s feverish, overwhelming and provides a snapshot into the mind of a person struggling and past the point of self-care.
On the creation of the song The Line said, “As for the creative process of creating the song – it was mostly written and produced in my room in a cottage I was living in Clogherhead, in rural Louth a couple of years ago. I guess the goal was to sonify grief and a range of negative emotions I was dealing with at the time. The noise build was probably an opportunity for me to lose control, because it’s not something that’s necessarily acceptable in day-to-day life. We’re supposed to be control our emotions, but sometimes they need to be expressed/expelled. The whole process was quite cathartic. I continually worked on this at an outrageously high volume, probably because I felt the need to fill the silence.”
“Though there aren’t that many words in the song, they’re pretty important. The title is borrowed from a Modest Mouse song called Trailer Trash and I think that song helps to contextualise this one quite well. In fact, it probably tells the half of the story that I was too obtuse/lazy to explain in the track!”
Complementing the immersive sounds is the approach from director Alexander, who used unconventional methods to highlight the main character’s emotional volatility.
“I was interested in using Sam Peckinpah’s explosive impressionistic action scene style, but applying it to something ridiculously un-explosive, like a hug, because it’s explosive to him.”
Watch the video below:
