Portland kraut-pop band WL have been releasing videos for each song from their upcoming album Light Years, out October 28. The latest, "Feeling Down," is a painstakingly crafted animation by director Zach Erickson, with drawings by Souther Salazar, and help from the band themselves. The group's frontwoman Misty Mary appears as a black-and-white newsprint version of herself, navigating an blue world full of odd shapes. There's a dazed, distant quality to the song: from Mary's voice to the chirping organs and even the motorik movement of the song itself, it's a doped-up dance party in the middle of purgatory.
"[The song] is a meditative shuffling dance piece which represents the amelioration of negative, depressive feelings through the realization of creative work," the band told The FADER over the email, and director Zach Erickson brought all kinds of artistic methods to the clip.
He wrote: "I combined the video cut-outs of Misty with straight-ahead animation of lots of other materials like colored gels, optical illusion illustrations, German glass glitter, and a laser beam. We also collaborated with artist Souther Salazar who did frame-by-frame painting over the video print-outs of Misty in some sections of the video. I was working in the style of old traditional stop-motion animators who used to shoot on film without the aid of the onion-skinning feature that helps animators these days with lining things up and working out timing."