The Bay Area’s Wild Moth exudes their dark take on punk in the new video for their single, “Mirror”, which will be off their forthcoming Iron Pier debut, out this summer. The track is a continuation of a developing deterrence from punk’s normal furies, replacing harshness with tonal melancholy and pleasantly morbid curiosity. High harmonic licks tip-toe over not quite discordant, blazingly distorted chords and a pounding rhythm section, while the total emotionless inflection of Austin Montanari’s melodic vocals pleasingly nourishes the severity of the guitar tones. A rather trippy vocal effect is incorporated during the bridge, in which bassist Carlos Salas takes over and hums, “closer to real, into the clear,” in a similarly hollow voice, but profoundly more spacy and vibrating.
The video itself is visually stunning, with blossoming bursts of pinks and reds coating the players, dimly lit, as they perform the track, almost like a moving version of the Loveless album cover. An alternating use of strobe effects, sudden camera cuts, and slow dissolves, create a dreamlike effect—liquid-paint images, flowers, a self-playing guitar superimposed against the band, whose playing changes from slow-motion to real time, in and out of sync with the track. All effects, both imagistic and sonic, seem to fuse together at the video’s close, the guitars jarringly wailing tremolo bars, while the images all blur together, like a sudden, smudged-together glimpse of their life in the video.
Wild Moth is currently on tour with Whirr:
April
15 Denver, CO
17 Fort Worth, TX
18 Austin, TX
19 San Antonio, TX
20 El Paso, TX
21 Mesa, AZ
22 Las Vegas, NV
23 Bakersfield, CA
24 Santa Cruz, CA
25 Oakland, CA
