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Apr 21, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Ingmar Chen

Brooklyn-based shoegaze band Lightning Bug are releasing a new album, A Color of the Sky, on June 25 via Fat Possum (their first for the label). Now they have shared the album’s second single, “September Song, pt. ii,” via a video for the song. Sarah Bolander wrote, directed, and choreographed the video. It features both Bolander and Lightning Bug frontwoman Audrey Kang and was filmed on a small island off of the coast of Maine. Watch it below.

Kang had this to say about the song in a press release: “In summer of 2018 I spent about a month camping alone on this cliff on a small island in the Baltic Sea. There where I was in the north off the coast of Stockholm, the sun was setting insanely late, like at 11pm and it took hours longer than normal. So I’d watch it disappear, this glowing orb sink into the sea every night to the point where I felt kind of insane, like I was hallucinating…and I started reliving memories but they felt like they were right before me and then I felt confused, was I reliving memories, or seeing into the future? I kept thinking to myself, each end is a beginning, each end is a beginning. So this surreal experience with time lay dormant in me, and then an entire year later, I was camping in the PNW, also on the shore, and I watched the sun sink into the sea, and suddenly those sunsets from Sweden rippled through me again very vividly. And when I came back to New York, I wrote this song.”

Previously Lightning Bug shared a video for the album’s lead single, “The Right Thing Is Hard To Do,” which was one of our Songs of the Week.

The band’s most recent album, October Song, came out in 2019. The band’s core lineup also features Kevin Copeland (guitar, vocals) and Logan Miley (engineer, synths, textures). Touring members Dane Hagen (drums) and Vincent Puleo (bass) also joined the band in the studio for the first time with this album. A Color of the Sky was recorded in the in the Catskills in a rundown old house turned into a makeshift studio.

Summing up the album in a previous press release, Kang said: “I want listeners to explore their own interior worlds. It’s about learning to trust yourself, about being deeply honest with yourself, and about how self-acceptance yields a selfless form of love.”

Check out our COVID-19 Quarantine Artist Check In interview with the band.

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