Grouper shares video for new song "Ode to the Blue"

Grouper has shared a second single off her anticipated new album Shade, which was recorded at various points over the past 15 years. Like previous single “Unclean Mind,” new song “Ode to the Blue” finds Grouper working in the folky realm of 2008’s classic Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, and this one’s even more somber and bare-bones. The song comes with a video directed by Dicky Bahto, who says:

Liz sent me a love song in the middle of the worst part of the pandemic in Los Angeles to think about making a film for. I was depressed and scared and felt incapable of thinking. She mentioned picturing people kissing; and “maybe something in a graveyard.” I wanted to see my friends. I wanted to feel intimacy again. I thought: what if the film is just people making out in graveyards?

In Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights I found myself surrounded by graves for people who, like my own grandparents, had survived the Armenian and Assyrian genocide a little over a hundred years ago. After a year of fear over the pandemic, growing support for right-wing authoritarianism, and the escalating climate crisis—with a popular narrative that we’re living through the end of the world—I needed the reminder that the end of the world is always happening somewhere, and even if we don’t survive the end of our world, we might as well enjoy the pleasures of love. Watching my friends kiss was a hot, fresh breath direct from their mouths that made me feel a joy I hadn’t experienced in far too long.

Check it out below. The album comes out 10/22 via Kranky.