Brooklyn quintet the Drums won fans in 2010 on the strength of their self-titled debut, which nodded to ’80s Anglo-pop bands like New Order and the Smiths, and flaunted frontman Jonny Pierce’s “knack for funneling broad emotions into blissfully melodic and charmingly specific narratives,” we wrote in our eight-out-of-10 review. Now they’re back with their just-released second LP, Portamento (Frenchkiss Records), and SPIN has the exclusive video premiere for album gem “How It Ended.” Watch below!
The artsy clip, which looks more like an oil painting than a music video thanks to the filter used, follows Pierce as he strolls around London alone, longing for a girl who got away. But it’s not just love that Pierce misses — it’s the days of yore when the Drums made their first trip to the U.K.
“[London] is a place that brings me a good level of comfort and at the same time keeps me on edge, which I think any great city should do,” Pierce tells SPIN. “We took three days for filming which happened to be the same three days that we were playing a few small intimate shows around London. It made us a bit nostalgic because it was just like the first time we came to London as a band, and our worlds changed forever.”
Says director Patrick Roberts: “For Jonny, this is a very personal song. We wanted to convey a tone of recollection, memory, and longing. While the lyrical content could refer to a person, we wanted to play with the idea that it could also refer to a place.
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“We chose to keep the images within a specific color palette, in order to heighten the sense and theme of memory. Memories are often tinted or abstracted, so we also texturized the images. We chose to incorporate figures that were ghostly, painterly, and saturated in color. We wanted a video that retained a sense of human touch. Something visceral and intimate.”
