Massachusetts singer-songwriter Ella Williams, a.k.a. Squirrel Flower, will release a new album called Planet (i) this summer. The follow-up to her 2020 debut album, I Was Born Swimming, which earned her a spot as a Rolling Stone Artist You Need to Know, arrives June 25th on Polyvinyl Records.
Squirrel Flower’s first single from the album is a grungy slow-burner called “Hurt a Fly,” where she sings about miscommunications over guitars that gradually build in intensity and distortion. “Took it too far again/Thought that you were my friend,” Williams begins, later pleading, “Have you never made a mistake?/Have you never said what you didn’t wanna say?”
In a statement, Williams explained that she wrote the lyrics in character: “‘Hurt a Fly’ is me embodying a persona of gaslighting, narcissistic soft-boy type shit. The classic, ‘Sorry I acted violently, I’m not mad that you got upset at me, wanna hang out next week?’ I wanted to see what it was like to be a character trying to skirt around accountability. It’s an angry and unhinged song.”
In the music video for “Hurt a Fly,” directed by Ryan Schnackenberg, Williams rolls around on the ground in a plastic bubble (sort of like a more psychologically unsettling version of the ones Flaming Lips use at their shows). The press statement includes a tale of an odd occurrence at the video shoot: “A stranger filmed me practicing choreography at a public park, submitted it to a meme page making fun of ‘influencers,’ and the video got 1,000,000 views, which in my mind is perfect thematically.”
Squirrel Flower recorded Planet (i) in Bristol, England, with producer Ali Chant and musicians including Portishead’s Adrian Utley. In her Artist You Need to Know interview last year, Williams mentioned some of the themes she was thinking about for her next LP: “I’d say now my relationship with water is one of being in awe and being terrified by the power of it. The power of there being too much of it, and also of there being none, in relation to climate change.”
MUSIC PREMIERES
SEVENTEEN slink into a gloomy, post-apocalyptic world filled with old school technology in the video for their Pharrell Williams-produced single “Bad Influence.” The 13-member K-pop boy band dropped the visual from their new HAPPY BURSTDAY album on Wednesday (June 11) and fans will surely be picking through the arresting clip directed by Beomjin for days looking for Easter eggs.
The video for the English-language single opens with the singers locked in reflective glass pentagons as they sing about wanting to have a good time while seeming like they’re not having one at all. After escaping from the enclosure, they get chased around a brutalist structure by robot dogs singing, “And I had time to think about it/ But life would be so much better without it/ I don’t want it at all/ But, hey, I wanna have a good time” over Pharrell’s insistent, fuzzed-out beat.
And while the song is about having a good time, the action makes it seem like that is a stretch. Dressed in Blade Runner-like leather jackets designed by Japanese fashion house sacai, they stand around while an unseen member plugs an analog cord into a headphone jack that reads “Good” as an old school dot matrix printer spits out the lyrics and a few of the guys ghost ride their old school muscle cars.
The sci-fi action takes a bizarre turn halfway through when they enter a red zone filled with white mannequin heads wearing blindfolds as one of the singer’s puts a checkmark next to “bad” on a checklist that includes “lost,” “sad,” “raw,” “happy,” “innocent” and other emotions. There is also an M.C. Escher-like stairway to nowhere, a bath in a swamp of vintage audio tape, contemplative posing on a pile of tires and moody standing around in dimly lit rooms in the dream sequence-like series of shots that leave more questions than answers
HAPPY BURSTDAY debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart, landing the group their seventh top 10-charting album.
Watch the “Bad Influence” video below.
