Mock Suns | photo by Chelsea Schryver | courtesy of the artist
Mock Suns on mixing sound and visuals on the new “Friday Night” video
Philly indie-psych outfit Mock Suns have always had a healthy mix of art with their rock. Their 2012 debut Here Nor There was released in conjunction with paper masks hidden at various places around the city. The 2014 double EP Santander / All That I Knew was packaged with beautiful monochromatic photographs of the bandmates in various natural settings.
“The visuals have always been super important to us,” says frontman Greg Puglese. “Especially for me, coming from a visual arts background. I studied design in school, I’ve always been to making videos and all around doing it myself.”
The band’s newest song, “Friday Night,” comes with its own striking visual component. And it’s the first time where Mock Suns turned over creative control for one of it’s projects to a collaborator, Stacey Holder of Cargo Collective. (Puglese admits he was nervous not having a hand in the project for the first time but is stoked about the results.)
In the video, a grid of bright, Pantone-esque colors that expand and retract, and a rectangle in the center that dips in and out of focus, sometimes revealing a car racing video game, others showing an actual car racing down I-95, capturing the essence of a Friday night on the town.
The song is psychedelic and atmospheric, following nicely alongside the band’s back-catalog, but had a cool piano melody and rhythmic bounce akin to Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (specifically “Kamera” and “Heavy Metal Drummer”). But the band’s influences actually go a little further back. As Puglese said in our phone interview:
The idea behind the album was to sort of focus in on the 90s-era first music we got into. Which was corny R&B stuff, which doesn’t really come through in the music. But we actually started out our songs out with samples from that time period and built off of those. I guess the mood and lyrics, more so than music were the inspiration. This song has a bit of a nod to Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It” in the lyrics.
Watch the video and hear the song “Friday Night” below, and get psyched for Mock Suns’ album release party at Johnny Brenda’s on Saturday, March 19th – tickets and more information can be found here.