Loved Ones are today premiering a video for their new single “One Big Kiss”. Specially created for the band by acclaimed American songwriter Bill Baird as a thank-you for a recent collaboration with lead singer Nik Glover, it has been painstakingly assembled by layering individual images on top of one another. Glover offers some further insight;

“Bill asked me to go into the studio and add backing vocals to a couple of tracks he was working on at Parr Street Studios, in Liverpool. We were really happy with the results and he offered to make us a video by way of a thank you. His idea was to take a film of me performing the track and break it into 240 individual stills – one for every second of the song. He then printed them and animated it using different camera speeds and edits. Watching it back, there’s a bit of La Jetée in the way he fitted it together. His videos are always eye-catching. He has his own visual style and it inflects everything he does. If you watch his meditations videos they have that Mark Cousins thing of slightly hypnotising you.”

The band’s new album – Rough Trade Album of The Week, “Harness” – sets its stall out as a move into an eclectic, but no less focussed, sphere of operation. With previous singles “End of An Error”, and “Without Face” we got a sense of the band’s ability to marry skittering percussion with lead singer Nik Glover’s immaculate falsetto. On “One Big Kiss” they reach for widescreen alt-pop, as Glover comments;

“It’s a really simple song primarily about the pressure that is brought to bear on single people, by their families, as they move out of the traditional coupling stage of life. It’s meant to sound quite bitter. It’s partly about wanting to be absolutely comfortable in your own company, and also having a nagging resentment at the back of your mind and suspicion of other people’s relationships; like they’re pretty much dog and chain, master and servant. Not the relationship between two partners necessarily, but often between two mindsets within one person – the part of you that wants to be molly-coddled and restricted and tamed, and the other part that wants to lash out.”

“Harness” is out now on Blood Records

Loved Ones are:

Nik Glover – vocals, guitar

Rich Hurst – keys, production

Ben Shooter – piano, vocals

Dan Taylor – drums