Premiere: In a Daydream Shares New Video for “The Romantic Egotist”
This Side of Purgatory is Out Now
Dec 03, 2021
Photography by Kris Hermann
Detroit-based outfit In a Daydream self-describe their music as “emo art rock,” taking inspiration from heart-rending balladeers like Elliot Smith, art rock greats like Radiohead, pop touchstones like the Beach Boys, and, of course, plenty of early 2000s emo influences. Singer/songwriter Bryan Porter solely wrote their debut album, This Side of Purgatory, before bringing on Poppy Morawa, Jake Rees, and Adrian Clark from fellow DIY emo outfits to round out their sound onstage. Porter also paired with Nick Diener (Greet Death, Hot Mulligan) on production and mixing and Tyler Floyd (Dogleg, Worst Party Ever) on mastering.
This Side of Purgatory is out now and alongside the release the band have also shared a new video for “The Romantic Egoist,” premiering with Under the Radar.
Though the band’s inspirations are diverse, This Side of Purgatory synthesizes them admirable, crafting a near-seamless marriage of theatricality, pop hooks, explosive emo instrumentation, and emotional intimacy. After the brief and distant melodic opener, “Darkness Deepens” the band moves between twinkling acoustic passages and full-throttle emo heights on “Dear God (A Farce Rewritten as a Tragedy).” Similarly, Porter trades in fractured distorted lo-fi for beautiful acoustic balladry on “It’s Not Your Fault (x10)” and offers a tremendous anthemic finish with “Everything Hurt Beautifully,” offering a resolution to the record’s themes of loss and growth.
Porter says of the album, “I should start by saying I’m dedicating this record to the memory of my best friend Patrick Badgley, who passed away in 2014 at just 22 years-old. This record is about the grieving process and learning to forgive yourself for doing somewhat destructive things in an attempt to cope with a loss, and how sometimes the best way to find true happiness is accepting the fact that everything is not always going to be okay. Sometimes when you’re experiencing something as painful as the unexpected death of a loved one, you can be so desperate to feel anything else that you resort to things like substances and other self-destructive behaviors to get some relief, but the only way to truly move on is to embrace reality and try to find whatever small bits of happiness you can within the new normal of life without whoever or whatever you lost. It’s still a very emotional record for me to listen to and play live, which I can only hope is a sign that it will affect other people when they hear it too.”
As emotionally heavy as the album is, the new video for album highlight “The Romantic Egotist” offers a glimpse into a different side of the band, bringing self-effacing humor to match the band’s emo riffs and bright pop interludes.
Porter says of the accompanying video, “For the video, which I wrote and directed with the help of my super-talented friend and videographer Nick Sheufelt, I wanted to do a humorous satire of stereotypical ideas of what fame looks like to a struggling wannabe rock star. The video starts with the band just sitting around critiquing an utterly ridiculous ‘What Does Fame Look Like?’ dream board that I made in the video to persuade my other band members into dressing cooler.
Then when the song picks up, the video shifts into a daydream sequence of a photo/video shoot where the band has all become the idealized ‘famous’ versions of themselves, and hilarity ensues. And finally, the song dies back down and we are back in the room where we started, no closer to rock stardom and full of doubt as to whether ‘fame’ is really what we want at all. We had a lot of fun shooting this, and I thought it would be nice to have a lighter/funny video to sort of balance out how serious the record itself is. I don’t want people to think that we’re all brooding emo cliches, even if the music on the record can be really heavy emotionally.”
Check out the album and video below. This Side of Purgatory is out everywhere now.
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