POSH HAMMER
"FALL"
Premiere
POSH HAMMER
Premiere track ‘FALL’ from The Iranian-American brother/sister duo
Growing up in the millennium can be complicated. Synth-pop duo Posh Hammer bring to light the ravages of young adulthood with their upcoming pair of singles, “Everywhere Tonight”
and “Fall.”
""Fall" started out as a much slower song based around just piano and strings but we felt that version didn't capture some of the darker tones we wanted the song to have.
We ended up keeping the lyrics but writing a new melody and a new beat. We wanted to emphasize the weariness in lyrics, but we didn't want it to be a slow song. I ended up with this mid tempo vibe that feels tired, like
a long night out slowly chugging to an end".
Building on their 2018 EP, Dancing In Place, which earned them the Van Gogh Award at the 2018 Amsterdam Film Festival, the pop surveyors continue to explore themes of alienation and isolation and dig further into the dark side of social media culture.
“Everywhere Tonight” sinks into the frantic, pulse-raising mayhem of Instagram. The synths mimic the irresistible urges to spy on people doing seemingly cooler things than you in cooler places.
“It’s more complicated to think of you as mine,” sings Tasnim, who teeters between insecurity and taking the plunge. Then, “Fall,” glistening with a new layer of polish, buckles underneath the weight of the night’s last moments.
“If we get stranded tonight, I would fall for you,” she confesses, a forthright statement brought to life between flecks of glitter and ever-present social pressures.
Tasnim and Navied paint with the kind of brutal truths absent from much of popular music, and with their new singles, they continue to impress.
A visual for “Everywhere Tonight” is coming down the pipeline in which Posh Hammer continues to analyzing today’s social behaviors.
“The video is a collection of Instagram stories we found randomly from people all over. We wanted to recreate the feel of sitting home at night on a weekend, looking on Instagram,” explains Navied.
2018’s Dancing in Place EP also snagged a selection slot and performance at the 2018 Richmond International Film Festival for the band’s wholly inventive audio and visual pieces. Across five songs and five music videos Posh Hammer bring to life the story of two love-torn celebrities who must navigate the demands of internet fame and keep their romance from falling apart.
Visually speaking, Navied and Tasnim draw upon their adoration with an Italian
director named Michelangelo Antonioni, whose early 1960s trilogy (L’Avventura, La Notte and L’Eclisse) observed how the social scene was undergoing great changes of its own.
“Antonioni directed films about isolation and alienation,” explains Navied, “and we wanted to take these themes and bring them into 2019.”
Strewn across playful uses of lighting and spatial relationships, the
videos utilize pop trends to frame a fresh perspective.
“We wanted to take elements of what is happening in current music videos and subvert them.” explains Navied, who sat in the director’s chair for the
very first time.
Growing up in Asheville, NC, Tasnim and Navied were exposed to David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen, and Bryan Ferry, pop titans who instilled them with the basics of how pop music works.
The band found a natural and accepting fan base with the LGBTQ community. The bulk of
Posh Hammer’s live shows in recent past have been at gay pride festivals around the country, with a number of their performances following drag shows.
Posh Hammer demonstrate admirable commitment to self-sufficiency. Navied and Tasnim have written, recorded, and produced all their songs themselves. In their early teens, both started playing guitar and piano, and that skillset serves them well here.
“As soon as we picked up instruments, it was just normal for us to play together,” says Tasnim, noting the plethora of Beatles classics they used to cover.
“Eventually, that lead us to start writing our own stuff,” notes Navied.
That’s where “Fall” and “Everywhere Tonight” come into play, extensions of the darkest shadows of existence then reflected in the glistening, inescapable mirror of popular celebrity culture. It’s as commercial as it is truly emotional.
The two songs operate as an extension of what has come before but also a surefire sign of where they plan to go next: world domination.
B I Z Z A R R E
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