Hamsas are popular symbols to wear within the Jewish community, as well as the within the Muslim, Buddhist, and other Middle Eastern communities – what was the significance of it being on Eve’s back? They’re just a transliteration of the words “Saint Slumber ” which means they aren’t the Japanese words for “Saint” and “Slumber,” but if a person speaking Japanese were to read those characters aloud it would sound very close to what the words sound like in English.
What do the characters underneath your name on the “Saint Slumber” title-card mean? This is a small homage, but it will become more direct with the upcoming videos from this record. The videos of YOUTH//3 are all intended to touch on and thematically complete the videos of our first two records, YOUTH//1 and YOUTH//2. Your previous video, “GETAWAY” featured burlap as well, was that at all intended or planned? (Or was it just a coincidence?) Hopefully, it’s a jarring difference on a purely visual level to better execute the idea on the metaphorical one! Black and white are typically polar opposites, but the sterility of white I think is strongly contrasted by the deep passion and violence of red. I touched on it above, but the importance lies in contrast. The video is entirely black and white, except for red – is there any importance to this? Playing on the stages next to their gear, in front of the same crowd that they perform in front of, is really hard to wrap your head around. Running into titans of the music industry in the bathroom backstage is a difficult thing to grow accustomed to. It’s a cliche answer for a reason, but it was surreal. What was it like sharing the stage with such huge names like “Walk the Moon,” “Portugal.
The concept behind the video is spartan, but we think that it highlights the idea of opposites in an obvious and digestible way. We wanted a clean, starkly white aesthetic that we could juxtapose harshly with a red-soaked opposite we juxtaposed a brightly lit performance with one shrouded in mostly-darkness we quickly oscillated between normal shots of the characters with inverted ones. Touching on the concept I mentioned earlier– the idea that things may seem one way but maybe another in reality– we wanted visuals that focused strongly on duality. It’s very frantic and rushed, but we’ve all worked together for so long that we have good short-hand, and we fit into our roles nicely: we have a very unified vision for the videos.Ĭan you break down the message of the music video? This means that our video shoots are planned in a very cost-effective way it usually ends up with us shooting multiple scenes for multiple music videos simultaneously in a very small window of time. What was the process like for making the video?Īll of our videos at this point are self-directed, produced, and executed. We are inspired greatly by religious iconography and surrealist visuals, so most of our videos at this point try to access those visual tropes in a way that is affordable to us. It’s hard to say where exactly we get our inspiration since the limitations ($$$) of our shoots inform a lot of our choices.
I think MANTRA was written as a way of criticizing myself for patterns I was seeing in my own behavior: over-idealizing people, places, and things, putting a lot of faith into concepts and ideas, and MANTRA is written as a criticism of that sort of mentality.
I’m big on introspection and retrospection.