Taken from their upcoming album Somewhere Nice, out in June, UK fusion band Sunday Driver have announced a new single, Somewhere Nice, and we’re delighted to be able to premiere it right here on Backseat Mafia today. It’s the bands first new music since last years Time Machine single, and the album is the follow up to their 2014 album Flo.
Of the track, singer Chandy says: “Escapism, being transported to that ‘other place’ – whether real or imaginary – that’s what the song is fundamentally about. Even when everything seems to be falling apart, there’s a voice in your head that tells you that ‘here and now’ is transitory and that there will be a release from it all, maybe it’s inaccessible right now but it’s there and you will get to it, someday a long way from now. This song has taken on new meaning for me after lockdown – it encapsulates a sense of being at breaking point but still managing to hold it together. Holding on to the conviction that we will (eventually) be somewhere else. Somewhere Nice.”
The track itself is this amalgamation of jazz and psych pop, the whole thing bounding along in 7/4, which apparently represents the lyrics and themes around their new album, the band saying “in all the major religions seven represents the highest heaven – ‘seventh heaven’. It celebrates exploration and escape to the ultimate (hedonistic) paradise.” It has this warmth and intimacy that draws you in, it’s stuttering time waylayed by layers of guitar, stabs of woodwind, and delicious melodies.
On the video, the band told us “the video, like the song, is about escape. I was chatting with my kid about how I’d found our disco lights and the idea that the lights might reflect quite nicely off the clear record struck. So when I got home, I filmed the record playing with the trippy lights bouncing off it. That footage was then spliced with archive studio and live footage, the wicker man scenes of my lockdown walk around my local countryside… I threw it all into an amazing live gif maker and made dozens of trippy 4 second clips … using a video editor I fiddled about to connect the visual with the different changes in the song… the visual narrative is dictated by the song’s rhythms.”
Check it out, here
