A gentle beat, a psychedelically blazing organ, subdued guitar arpeggios, to which an echoing female voice whispers. The first sounds of 'Beach Baby, Baby', the new EP by Nick & June, cause several associative bells to ring at once: Dream Pop! LoFi! Sixties! And those who have known the duo from Nuremberg for a while may be momentarily puzzled: Where’s the indie-folk? Well, after a creative break (and more than two pandemic years) it’s okay to start a new chapter, right?
With the first single ‘Anything But Time’, Nick & June float in a glittering fog of trilling synthesizers, gentle beat and drum pulses and vibrating organ sounds. Embedded in dark reverb guitars, the bitter-sweet paired voices of Suzie-Lou Kraft and Nick Wolf lead the way through euphorically orchestrated restraint and meditative ramifications of thought. Where parallels were once drawn to artists like Bon Iver, Damien Rice, and Angus & Julia Stone, now also Beach House, Mazzy Star, and Lana Del Rey, peer through the reverb-veil.
Nick & June explained, "The song was written really fast, very stream-of-consciousness, really really fast. It’s a brief song, with simple sounds, in fact just an old Casio keyboard and a drum machine, with lots of ideas in it. We don’t do too much talking about the lyrics so people can interpret them in their own way. Besides, sometimes even we don’t know one hundred percent what they mean.“
The band shot the accompanying video in an old hotel in Berlin, a late 19th-century tenement house that was once home to silent movie star Asta Nielsen.
"We have watched many classics of film history and all time favorites in Pandemic - maybe that's why the overall concept of the EP has a cinematic touch. With these impressions absorbed, we quickly had a firm idea of what the video should look like. The Hotel Funk in Berlin, as an already stunning location, was adapted even more to our wishes by Lillie Ceben, who was responsible for the set design, and Jeanette Friedrich then captured them and shortened them to two minutes thirty - which was really hard with such beautiful material. I believe that with Maja Bons as the actress, we have found the one person who can make this video fun from head to toe.“
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