Deap Vally, The Los Angeles-based duo comprising Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards, today (26th February) release their Digital Dream EP, a series of collaborations with artists loved by the band. To celebrate the release, the band has shared the video for the EP’s lead single, Look Away, featuring jennylee of Warpaint.
The video for Look Away, which is currently sitting pretty on Radio 6 Music’s A List, was directed by filmmaker Tristan Scott-Behrends, with the shoot day the first time Lindsey and Julie had seen each other in person since the start of the COVID lockdown last March. Working around restrictions, some shots of Julie and jennylee were self-filmed on their phones, but even the most stringent health and safety checks couldn’t stop Lindsey from almost floating off into the ocean on the inflatable mattress in between takes!
Says Lindsey Troy, “My hope was that the video would capture the breezy essence of summer in Los Angeles that is depicted in the lyrics of the song. Tristan's vision exceeded my expectations. 'Look Away' takes us into a surreal dreamworld. This song is so special to me, and the video is everything I’d hoped for and more. It's a miracle that we pulled this off during Covid.”
Tristan Scott-Behrends adds, “In a time where we are all picturing ourselves in other places, the lyrics of the song really resonated with me. Had we made this a year prior, I imagine the video would have had Lindsey, Julie and jennylee in it together, but in order to make this safely we leaned into what we were presented with. It was an extraordinary privilege to get to make a video for such a fantastic song. Lindsey and Julie are dear, close friends and it was really special to come out of our homes and see one another for the first time in nearly a year.”
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR LOOK AWAY HERE!!
STREAM THE DIGITAL DREAM EP HERE!!
About Digital Dream
Lindsey Troy and Julie Edwards have always relished the challenge of working within the limitations of being a two-piece, but after two records (Sistrionix, 2012 and Femejism, produced by Nick Zinner of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, 2016) and years of touring as a duo, they felt an urge to reinvent their writing and recording process.
Rather than be locked in a battle of wills between two parties, they sought collaborators to break the tie and allow for an organic, majority-rules creative process. Those collaborators include jennylee (Warpaint), KT Tunstall and Peaches, Soko and Jamie Hince (The Kills). They also experimented with self-producing, working with studio engineer and longtime friend Josiah Mazzaschi (Jesus and Mary Chain, Idles). Finally addressing the eternal question, “Will you ever add a third member?”, they decided it would be more of a creative adventure to collaborate with a bunch of different artist friends rather than commit to one.
The result is a true creative renaissance for the duo, more liberating than they could ever have imagined. They broke all the Deap Vally rules, letting the collaborations be a musical free-for-all where anything goes. They added whatever instrumentation a track called for, in whatever genre or mood was spontaneously occurring, rather than limit themselves to guitar and drums, blues and rock.
The Digital Dream EP track listing runs as follows:
Look Away (with jennylee (Warpaint)
Digital Dream (with Soko, Zach Dawes (Mini Mansions, Last Shadow Puppets)
High Horse (with Katie Tunstall & Peaches)
Shock Easy (with Jamie Hince (The Kills)
The Digital Dream EP follows Deap Vally’s 2020 collaboration with Flaming Lips as Deap Lips, and is the first of a series of Deap Vally releases to follow later this year.
How the Digital Dream collaborations came to be…
LOOK AWAY: Julie has known jennylee since the early 2000s, when they met through friends at the Mustard Seed Cafe in Los Feliz, before either woman even played an instrument. Years later, Lindsey and jennylee bonded over a bonfire at a birthday celebration at Brody Dalle and Josh Homme’s house.
DIGITAL DREAM: Likewise with Soko, both Lindsey and Julie knew her separately: Soko’s brother, Maxime, actually gave Lindsey blues guitar lessons, while Julie met Soko after an Echoplex Battle of the Bands fundraiser for 826 LA in 2009. Soko needed a ride home and the rest is history. Soko went on to join Deap Vally on bass when they played an in-store at Amoeba records and Julie and Lindsey were super impressed with the wicked bass lines she came up with for their songs. When they got into the studio together they were buzzing with excitement and ideas, and Digital Dream was the product. Soko invited Zack Dawes (Mini Mansions, Last Shadow Puppets) to contribute a spicy bass line. In the grand tradition of six degrees of separation, Julie and Zack had already known each other for years through Julie’s brother’s band, Autolux.
HIGH HORSE: Deap Vally met KT Tunstall when they both performed on Later… with Jools Holland in 2013. They’d stayed in touch via social media over the years and KT was jazzed when they asked her to get in the studio together. They wrote and recorded High Horse at Dave Grohl’s Studio 606. The only thing missing was a rap by Peaches. Lindsey’s friendship with Peaches began as a mutual fan-encounter at a restaurant in Silverlake: Lindsey approached Peaches to profess her admiration and it turned out Peaches was a Deap Vally fan, too. Deap Vally went on to open for Peaches in 2015.
SHOCK EASY: The final song was the result of an encounter with Jamie Hince of The Kills at a Queens of The Stone Age show. Lindsey got excited when she spotted Jamie in the audience. Julie and Lindsey later ran into him outside waiting for an Uber, and Lindsey told him she was a huge fan of The Kills and would love to have him produce some tracks for Deap Vally. The next week the three met up for dinner and decided to write some music together, which Jamie would produce. Shock Easy was inspired by the weight they all felt about the school shootings they kept reading about in the news. The process was a cathartic one, and they built a friendship through it.
