Under the moniker of Future Utopia, world renowned artist and producer Fraser T Smith today reveals the brand new video for his single, ‘Do We Really Care? Pt 1’ featuring Tom Grennan and Tia Carys and ‘Do We Really Care? Pt. 2’ featuring Simon Armitage.
The visually hypnotising, animated video was created in partnership by 1983 Creative, Ori Toor and Pentagram Design. Building on the album artwork, Ori Toor illustrated portraits of Tom Grennan and Tia Carys and created an illustrative city-scape backdrop – all in his signature colourful, psychedelic style.
The highly anticipated forthcoming album, ’12 Questions’, includes an incredible array of guest features including Stormzy, Dave, Kano, Ghetts and Bastille, as well as artists Es Devlin and Katrin Fridriks, poets Simon Armitage, Arlo Parks and Alysia Harris and former Black Panther, Albert Woodfox. ’12 Questions’ will be released via London based artist services company Platoon and Fraser’s own label 70Hz on 23rd October.
The album is based on a series of twelve universal, human and urgent questions, each of which is posed by Fraser to a different collaborator. The questions are born of Fraser’s own anxieties concerning topics such as faith, freedom, race, gender, wealth, equality and ecology. The album runs as a continuous composition, with clear delineation between each of its twelve questions.
The current single, ‘Do We Really Care? Pt. 1’ features Tom Grennan and breaking Londoner Tia Carys on vocals and its threads of clarinet and saxophone transition into an expansive, haunting choral version of Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 classic Summer in the City. When posed the question, ‘Do We Really Care?’ on ‘Do We Really Care? Pt.2,’ Poet Laureate Simon Armitage’s potent words offer a touching yet sceptical response; ‘here we go, planting our poppies then torching the forest, carelessly, serious’.
Future Utopia – ’12 Questions’ is out on 23rd October via Platoon/70Hz.
