Heartbreaking Bravery

Editor’s Note: There’s been a month-long gap in coverage, thanks to near-incessant travel and other extenuating circumstances. The following run of posts that contain this note will be posts that should have appeared sometime within the past several weeks. Use these posts as an opportunity to catch up to the present release cycle or to simply discover some new music. Either way, enjoy.

Back when this site ran the Best Songs of the First Quarter list, one of the more singular songs it contained was EERA‘s tremendous “Drive With Fear”, a hazy song that proved to be instantaneously gripping. Now, the song’s received a Katia Granfield-directed video, comprised almost entirely of grainy footage that manages to come across as, disconcertingly, connected and irreparably divorced.

There’s not a solid narrative function to be found in “Drive With Fear”, with Granfield instead adopting an approach more similar to what Shane Carruth managed with Upstream Color: a video designed to play directly to emotional response rather than painting a by-the-numbers plot. What’s surprising is how well Granfield succeeds on that count, “Drive With Fear” is an unsettling watch simply because of how easily it manages to evoke a variety of deep-seated feelings, playing to the songs strengths all the while.

Both a clip worth studying and worth experiencing, “Drive With Fear” winds up being difficult to shake by almost any measure. Strangely, the cognitive dissonance it creates winds up being more inviting than off-putting and, unsurprisingly, investment’s rewarded tenfold. In the end, “Drive With Fear” should be celebrated for its brave refusal to play into something easy; we need challenging art now more than ever and, by that count, this is a perfect introductory piece.

Watch “Drive With Fear” below and pick up a copy of the self-titled EP here.