Smoke Season lives by one rule: normal is fucking boring. Lead singer Gabby Bianco considers herself a mad scientist, with a passion for tinkering with both the analog and the digital: she has built light setups and runs the synths for Smoke Season’s live shows. She commands their music with a combination of vocal ferocity and gentle, ethereal soul that solidifies her as an unmistakable force of nature both on stage and in recordings.
Guitarist Jason Rosen expresses his brand of abnormality with fashion and grooves, bringing his Jamaican roots into their music through bold tropical colors and infectious rocksteady sounds. He laments the limits of menswear, opting to flaunt items from Gabby’s closet because fuck gender stereotypes too.
Smoke Season’s sound presents the duo as distinct individuals, adept lovers, and powerhouse performers; to know their art is to truly see them.
Today you can truly see them in the music video for their single “You”, which we are excited to premiere on Glide. With visuals that speak to the duo’s aesthetic of vibrant colors and performance art, the song veers from soulful and saccharine to ominous, wonky beats. This juxtaposition of sort of darkness and light, sensual and cold, allows Gabby Bianco to show off her impressive vocal range as the song gradually builds into a revelatory and eerily euphoric climax. The color-swatch choreographed heartbreak is open for multiple interpretations, but there is a certainty that this is some of the more compelling and different pop music being made might now. Video and photography by MK McGehee.
Gabby Bianco describes the inspiration behind the song and the video:
“’You’ is a song about heartbreak warping your perspective of the one you used to love. For the music video, we wanted to metaphorically capture the distortion of reality in a way that mimicked fading love. We used color and movement to represent the emotional components of a dying relationship — incorporating special effects to capture the ‘Eternal Sunshine for the Spotless Mind’ like interactions. It was important for us to have a woman director for this music video because, although heartbreak is non-binary in that it feels similar, there are nuances to the burdens gender roles present in relationships that get exacerbated when the love is failing. MK McGehee came onboard as director with a vision that was saturated in metaphor that would allow our audiences to have flexible interpretations of the meaning.”
WATCH:
For more music and info visit smokeseason.com.
Video Credits
Directed by MK McGehee
Photography by MK McGehee
Assistant Direction by Elizabeth Ayers
Styled by Kristin Condia
Hair & Makeup by Cynthia Diaz
Director of Photography: Jake MacPherson
Production Assistants: Sarah Portillo, Mark Huber
Lighting by Alexander Fenyves
Edited by Gabby Bianco
Coloring by Gabby Bianco
