Fresh from a sold-out gig at London’s Jazz Café last month and the release of their third studio album Looking For Space, New Zealand’s dreamiest band Mild Orange now share the official video for their news single ‘F.E.A.R’. Watch it HERE.
Directed & produced by Taylor Mansfield and Shyam Patel, the official video sees the band performing on Terandara Evening News where everything starts to go wrong, but the band carry on. With F.E.A.R meaning ‘Forget Everything And Relax’, the video expresses the songs message – about embracing your fears and keep going.
Mehrtens explains, “I had a mini obsession with the Eric Andre show last year and we had a few live shows last year where everything went wrong, such as amps blowing up, strings breaking, sticks snapping, guitar straps popping off, so this real-life scenario coupled with the chaos witnessed in the Eric Andre show gave me this initial concept. A lot of us will have a fear within ourselves that something will go wrong when we do things – but fear can prevent us from doing things, which in turn can keep us in our comfort zones. It’s when you run toward your fears that you grow”.
Looking For Space is the band’s most personal record to date and after spending two albums carefully organising the framed photos and applying an even layer of paint, Mild Orange felt the urge to tear apart the four walls that defined their bedroom pop sound, capturing the wilderness that lay beyond. Midway through recording the album, Mehrtens came down with pneumonia and pleurisy, a single breath capable of leaving him in excruciating pain. The experience not only changed the perspective of the rest of the record, but of Mehrtens’ life. “That put me into some pretty dark spaces,” he says. “But I’m an optimist, so I was searching for the beauty in the dark.”
Despite hailing from one of the world’s most isolated places on Earth, Aotearoa’s Mild Orange have become a band belonging to the world that have built an international following releasing songs that unfold like secrets shared between friends and lovers. Their internet-cult following has reached fans from Cairo to Cape Town, Lima to LA, Seoul to Sydney, London to Ulanbutar giving them close to 100 million YouTube views alone.
True to the group’s questing, nomadic form, Looking for Space was recorded in stretches over the last year, compiling sessions in beach houses, bedrooms, and for the first time a proper recording studio – the famous Roundhead Studio in Auckland. “This was our first time working on Mild Orange tracks in a premier studio, and having all that epic gear at our fingertips, coupled with having Studio Manager Paddy’s tech-wizardry engineering abilities on hand definitely jumped us up in quality and texture,” Mehrtens says. By honouring all those different spaces and crafting their own, Mild Orange have not only struck out on their search for meaning, but simultaneously found meaning where they were all along.
Looking For Space is out now digitally and on vinyl here. For details and ticket information to their Looking For Space Tour visit: mildorange.com.
