Porches Visits the “Country” in Video for New Single

As with all good music videos, the video for Porches’ new single “Country” begins at a very retro gas station in the flatbed of a pickup truck.

Directed by Porches (aka Aaron Maine) and Nick Harwood (producer on Blood Orange’s “Augustine” and “Sandra’s Smile” videos), and featuring vocals from Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes and Bryndon Cook, the video follows Maine through the winding roads and woods of his childhood in upstate New York.

There is a kind of yearning in the music that Maine describes in a statement as “a departure as well as an arrival.” The artist shared this poem to explain what the song means:

mini reckoning
Like flopping onto bed after first kiss high school
I left her apartment and made sure to keep the sleep on me all the way home
Rolled down the window across the bridge
And filled up my lungs
She told me about this saying about breaking the water to get somewhere
and i imagined what it would be like to swim together
I felt soft and dumb like a country song

There’s a turn in the video when Maine is suddenly sitting on top of the pickup truck rather than lying flat, bathed in sunlight, with his red sweater draped over his shoulders like the model king of the country club. Cut to a final shot of Maine wearing dressy white in front of red curtains, cigarette in hand, reflecting.

Porches has spent the past year working on the followup to his 2016 breakthrough record Pool. You can watch the video for “Country” below, and the video for past single “Be Apart” here.