Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.
Thursday, Radical Face released the video for their latest single “Hard of Hearing,” a contemplative yet upbeat departure from their usual acoustic-folk sound.
Ben Cooper, the mind behind the musical project, said in a statement that the song describes:
… the awkward middle period, that space where you don’t feel well at all, but you can outwardly function again. I learned from regular work with a therapist that you usually understand things long before you feel them, and that can create a sense of limbo. That limbo is where this song lives.
Cooper’s weekend therapy sessions inspired the title of his forthcoming EP Therapy, out April 26 via Bear Machine Records. He knows firsthand how confronting one’s past is a task easier said than done.
For Cooper, he used Radical Face’s Family Tree series (made up of The Roots, The Branches and The Leaves) as a means to explore his own fraught personal history by creating a fictional family. However, this particular creative process left the musician emotionally depleted, which eventually led him to therapy. Speaking about the Family Tree series, Cooper reflected, “I don’t regret it, but it wasn’t what I thought. I thought I was telling a different story, immortalizing the strange into something beneficial rather than just dysfunction.”
Now, Cooper tackles the emotionally messy “limbo” state with deft humor in the video for “Hard of Hearing.” A despondent Cooper, battered physically as well as emotionally, tries to patch up his life using the hilarious self-help book “Easy Steps to the New You.” The guide recommends seeing the world, grabbing coffee with a friend and—our personal favorite—summoning a citizen of the shadow realm.
Watch the video for “Hard of Hearing,” shot by fashion photographer Roy Berry, and check out the details of Therapy below. Cooper’s new track hits streaming services Friday, Feb. 22.
Therapy EP Art:
Therapy Tracklist:
01. Dead Ends
02. Better Days
03. Personal Giants
04. Guilt
05. Hard Of Hearing
06. Doubt