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Jul 27, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by McLean Stephenson

Liars (the project of Angus Andrew) are releasing a new album, The Apple Drop, on August 6 via Mute. Now they have shared its second single, “From What the Never Was,” via a video for it. Clemens Habicht directed the video, which seems to be set on a space station. Check it out below.

Previously Liars shared the album’s first single, “Sekwar,” via a video for the single. “Sekwar” was one of our Songs of the Week. Then Liars shared its second single, “Big Appetite,” via a disorientating video for it made by having a camera mounted to a drill.

Andrew had this to say in a press release: “‘From What the Never Was’ is intended as a moment of recollection within the journey of The Apple Drop; a point that our traveler has reached which is far from the starting place, but also right back there in memory. The drum sound was appropriated from an old song called ‘We Fenced Other Gardens with the Bones of Our Own.’ In that track, the protagonist is drunk on delusions of grandeur, relishing the power of destruction. Now far removed, that character is weary, remorseful.

“In preparation for the video, I went back to the ‘Sekwar’ cave to map it three-dimensionally. Instructed by a digital artist in NYC (Dan Moore), I strapped a 360-degree camera to my head and paced the lengths of the cave’s interior. The resulting data was transformed into a wireframe model and featured as a hologram in ‘FWTNW.’ The cave’s positioning right beneath another location manifests the premise of the song. You’re in the “same spot” but understanding it from a completely new perspective. My experience in revisiting that space alone was both psychologically informative and disturbing. The slow, methodical steps required to document the dark depths of the cave’s interior invited the company of bats and of fear.”

Director Clemens Habicht had this to say: “Angus and his crew are subjected to the traumas and melodramas of classic sci-fi tropes, brutalized by the sadism of scenes from films I think I was probably way too young to have seen as a kid. Only Liars would entertain and embrace my trepanning fantasies. Like any mission, this was only possible by the absolute commitment of everyone involved. Special thanks to DOP Tyson Perkins for signing up for another adventure, and to Beau and her team for their absolute generosity and excitement.”

Liars’ last two albums were 2017’s TFCF and 2018’s Titles With The Word Fountain. Both of those were more solitary affairs, the first recorded without founding member Aaron Hemphill. For The Apple Drop, Andrew embraced collaboration again, working with avant-garde jazz drummer Laurence Pike, multi-instrumentalist Cameron Deyell, and lyricist Mary Pearson Andrew.

“For the first time I embraced collaboration from an early stage, allowing the work of others to influence the work of my own,” said Andrew in a previous press release. He adds: “My goal was to create beyond my abilities—something bigger than myself.”

Of the album’s themes, Andrew said: “Momentum and revolution were themes I wanted to explore, to give the listener this sense of transformation and to feel like you were being transported through the wormhole.”

Summing up where he’s at now creatively, Andrew concluded: “Throughout Liars’ history I have consistently tried to develop new methods of creating music. On each project I’ve essentially abandoned previous methods and attempted to instead learn different ways of writing and producing songs. Where once I perceived this journey as a straight line, I’m increasingly realizing my trajectory is more akin to a spiral. As new ideas are generated, older ones take on new meaning and evolve further.”

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