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Aug 17, 2021 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Omar Akrouche

Harry the Nightgown is a new art pop duo from Sami Perez (Cherry Glazerr, The Shes) and Spencer Hartling. While working as audio engineers at Tiny Telephone recording studio, Perez and Hartling discovered a shared affinity for studio experimentation. That shared love eventually coalesced into the pair’s 2020 self-titled debut album.

This year the band has been following that debut record with two singles for Dangerbird Records’ Microdose series. The band has already shared “If You Were Wrong” and now they’re back with the second of the series, “The Painter,” premiering early with Under the Radar.

With “The Painter,” Harry the Nightgown continues to push their sound in delightfully strange new directions. Distorted electronic beats meet delicate guitar fingerpicking and otherworldly vocals from Perez. Later the song descends into a wild discordant soundscape before closing on angelic vocal orchestrations gradually unraveling into nothingness. Together, these elements form an eclectic art pop mosaic, with each angular piece adding new layers of beauty to the band’s fascinating creation.

As the band explains, “The lyrics tell the story of a love affair between artists that was designed to be forgotten.”

Perez continues, saying of the track, “As we were forced to work without outside musicians due to the pandemic, we sampled a beat Spencer had previously recorded on an SP-404 sampler and combined it with a voice message I happened to get from my little cousin while we were tracking the 404. There is a version of this song that is just the guitar part, vocals, and this drum sample. But we couldn’t leave it like that, of course, so in came the percussion and vocal orchestrations.”

Meanwhile, Noach Gavrich, director of the accompanying music video explains, “With the music video for ‘The Painter,’ I wanted to capture the feeling of looking back on a dissolved relationship. The past, seen through a lens of an old melodrama, is nostalgic and romanticized, but we learn that the protagonist’s feelings may not be what we initially thought. To situate us in that world, we shot on 16mm black and white negative, and used miniature models, a backdrop, and halogen lights to cast hard shadows, techniques that would have been used in the 50s, the era the characters exist in.”

Check out the song and video below. “The Painter” is out everywhere tomorrow, August 18th.