Charly Bliss Fall to the Feeling on New Single/Video, “Hard to Believe”
Photo by Ebru Yildiz
Brooklyn-based quartet Charly Bliss have debuted the third single from their forthcoming album Young Enough, an infectious ode to bad relationships called “Hard to Believe.” The song comes accompanied by a video depicting your average Charly Bliss band practice, with some funny and unsettling—let’s go with fun-settling—touches mixed in.
“‘Hard to Believe’ is a song about being addicted to a bad relationship, and the endless cycle of trying and failing to end one,” explains frontwoman Eva Hendricks. ”[Drummer Sam Hendricks] wrote the guitar riff very early on in the writing process of Young Enough and we’ve always been obsessed with playing it because it’s so insanely catchy.”
It certainly is. “Hard to Believe” is Charly Bliss power-pop in its purest form, an effervescent rocker that goes down like a shotgunned soda. As is customary for the band, the song’s bubbly instrumental blast belies harrowing emotional turbulence, a heavy weight masked by lightness: “I’m kissing everything that moves / I’m kissing anything that takes me far away from you,” sings Hendricks, unflinching in laying her conflicting feelings bare.
Of the video itself—which finds Charly Bliss performing through distractions that include grape soda, a photo of the sky and a menacing masked stalker—Hendricks explains:
We shot the video on 35mm film over two days with our close friend Henry Kaplan 24 hours after returning from SXSW. Henry did a spectacular job of incorporating each of our personalities into this video, as well as providing a slightly fantastical, but ultimately realistic portrayal of a typical band practice. While we’re running songs, each band-member usually has their own inner-monologue running of either things they’re distracted by, or things they’d rather be doing. This video feels extremely “us” and I don’t think we could have made it with anyone else.
“Hard to Believe” follows previous Young Enough singles “Chatroom” and “Capacity,” which came out in March and April, respectively. The band’s new album, meanwhile, due May 10 on Barsuk Records, follows their acclaimed 2017 debut LP Guppy, which Paste recently ranked among the very best releases from Barsuk’s first two decades as a label.