Choir of Young Believers can’t shake the fog in the new video for “Serious Lover” directed by Camilla Myhre. Sometimes, that’s just how it is…everywhere you look there’s that consuming, enervating fog seeming to drag you under–sapping your will. Jannis Noya Makrigiannis, the band’s frontman, might know a little something about this.
Exhausted after relentlessly touring his 2012 LP Rhine Gold (Ghostly International), the musician put the project aside to travel instead. Equipped with a pocket sampler his mother had given him for Christmas, Makrigiannis soon found himself creating again. While these initial beat-driven sketches didn’t seem like Choir of Young Believers’ material at first, they would eventually become early building blocks for the band’s new album Grasque, out again on Ghostly. The musician explains:
“With almost all of these songs, I had been in doubt. Some, I felt, were too poppy, others too experimental–some didn’t even feel like songs, but more like trips, or feelings. Some even had Danish and Greek lyrics. But now, it’s all Choir of Young Believers to me, and it feels great to have pushed the walls around the band, giving it a bit more space”.
Indeed, “Serious Lover” has a sultry pop vibe to it, but you can feel it pushing against its more comfortable structures. While the track wants to build into expected breaks and refrains, it often subverts these expectations–even briefly interrupting the cut’s pristine sound by bringing in a drum solo from what sounds like a live take from the record’s recording. It’s just these kinds of subtle left turns that elevate “Serious Lover” making it into luminous and infectious pop.
