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Feb 22, 2024 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Pat McKenna

Tomorrow, folk rock outfit Little Kid is back with their seventh full-length album, A Million Easy Payments, released via Orindal Records. The album was originally meant to follow soon after their 2020 effort, Transfiguration Highway, but the pandemic brought that pace down, allowing it to be written and recorded in successive bursts over the past three years.

As the band describes, “The resulting album is one of our most eclectic, with songs that take influence from more far-reaching sources, recorded in varying styles, circumstances, and fidelities…The title A Million Easy Payments isn’t directly related to any particular song but it feels connected to all of them. The repetition in a lot of these song structures might resemble the mundanity and helplessness of seemingly infinite, regular payments. There’s a certain exhausted despair, mixed with a bit of humour. Some of these songs get more personal than ever, while some of them contain the most ridiculous jokes I’ve managed to work into my writing. The best ones have a bit of both.”

Today, ahead of the album’s full release, the band have shared a new video for the record’s lead single, “Somewhere in Between,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Somewhere in Between” is a bleary folk rock ramble, one that feels warm and dreamy but cuts with a deeply catchy chorus. Chiming acoustic guitars dance with easygoing rhythms and reflective keys, highlighting Kenny Boothby’s hazy vocal tones and the track’s nostalgic lyrical bent. With the chorus the song takes flight but still remains thoroughly intimate, tracing both longing confessions and reflective imagery: “But now you’re driving / Bit above the limit on the highway / Cigarette but nothing there to light it / A song came on the radio that made you feel like you haven’t felt in years / And now you’re crying / Cause every time you hear it you’re reminded / Of a younger love but now you’re undecided / If it’s a piece of trash or a masterpiece / Probably somewhere in between.”

The video’s director and animator Alexandra Levy says of the video, “I was so honored that my first animated music video would be for Little Kid. I love their songs and have been following the project for years now. Initially, I thought I would do it all by hand and imagined it would look something like William Kentridge’s charcoal pieces. His method involves erasing and redrawing on the same page, which is a technique that works well for my brain (I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the hand-drawn frame-by-frame method). I love the relaxing nature of Kentridge’s work—how the movement looks on the page. As I started working on the Little Kid video, I discovered how fun it was to combine hand-drawn with digital techniques and make a blend, and left the charcoal dreams behind me. Like any creative project, the end result was nothing like I could have anticipated!”

Check out the song and video below. A Million Easy Payments is out tomorrow via Orindal Records.