Heartbreaking Bravery

This summer, Thursday’s have offered up a glut of outstanding material vying for coverage and today’s field was no different. Since there are nearly two dozen titles to touch on, they’ll be listed by virtue of artist and the represented format before moving onto the featured item. As usual, the single streams category proved to have the most productive release slate and included great new tracks from Hazel English, Sleepy, Infinity Girl, The Chills, Dark Palms, Wavves, Night Flowers, Willis Earl Beal, Blank Realms, and Air Waves. Music videos found some entertaining life via clips from Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Pet Cemetery, Kalle Mattson, Pink Frost, The Atom Age, and Pearl Charles. Topping everything off was a strong group of full releases that included releases from Worriers, Nice Legs, Fox Academy, Fog Lake, Suis La Lune, and Two White Cranes.

A lot of those band names are new to the site and Heat, who have today’s feature spot, are yet another new addition. Still riding high on the surge of last year’s excellent- and overlooked- Rooms EP, the band are now offering up a stark black-and-white clip for the release’s lead-off track. Using a minimalist approach to the visuals, director Jimmi Francoeur takes a few cues from some of Anton Corbijn’s formative work to create a sleek, engaging performance-sync clip. A room setup that’s clever in both construction and lighting lends an air of sophistication to the visually striking clip, while still allowing the bulk of the emphasis to fall on “This Life” itself, a punk-indebted powerpop number that cribs influences from a variety of other genres and sculpts it into something that manages to be both familiar and refreshing. In short: it’s a knockout from a band that deserves more attention than they’ve received.

Watch “This Life” below and pick up Rooms here.