© 2024
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

First Watch: Junip, 'Your Life, Your Call'

I love the crazy surprises you get when two or more artists get together and turn their creative ideas over to one another. When the band Junip wrote the song "Your Life, Your Call," frontman José González says, it was meant to be an unambiguous meditation on growing up, moving on and taking responsibility for your life. But in the hands of video director Mikel Cee Karlsson, the song, from Junip's new self-titled album, takes on a whole new (and disturbing) meaning.

As noted at the beginning of the video, "Your Life, Your Call" is actually the second part of an ongoing story. The characters were first introduced back in February in the (NSFW) video for another Junip track, "Line Of Fire." A man and woman fall in love, grow older, grow apart. In the new video, that same couple is back, older, and some lecherous, shirtless teenage boy with braces is slow-dancing with the now middle-aged wife while leering at her husband.

"The idea was to make a short film divided into two parts where each part is influenced by a separate song but still maintains to create a whole," director Karlsson tells us via email. "The story is partly told on a subconscious level where fragments of memory, along with subjective fears and dreams, are manifested, and just as relevant as anything else in the 'real world' to comprehend the characters and their actions. It is the experience of life in all It´s dark and comical absurdity."

Junip features José González on vocals and guitars, keyboardist Tobias Winterkorn and Elias Araya on percussion. The band's self-titled album is due out Apr. 23 on Mute.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Robin Hilton is a producer and co-host of the popular NPR Music show All Songs Considered.