Husband and wife team Kristina Parlee (The Maynards/The Reference Desk) and Ron Bates (Orange Glass/The Memories Attack) have recently reinvented themselves as synth-pop duo Smaller Hearts. Formerly Homo Duplex (also a synth pop duo) the two revised their sound to the point that something else had to change. You can get the first taste of it with the new single, “Summertime III”.
“We’ve been making music together for a while now, but when this group of songs started to come together it somehow felt like a new thing,” explains Bates.
“One of the things was the sudden volume of material. We only ever had shorter releases previously—three songs here, two songs there—and we just got really active in 2017 and realized we we’re making a full-length record. We’ve never been too consistent, but mostly by design. In terms of hardware, the new songs were fairly limited: one laptop, two synths, and one microphone. So even though there are definitely a bunch of different sounds on the record, they’re unified by coming from the same narrow-ish set of tools.”
The resulting sound is something that they’ve described as Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode mixed with Stereolab and My Bloody Valentine, and might sufficiently fill the void that the absence is The Postal Service in the world.
Smaller Hearts produced the video from a budget of nothing, and fitting of their creative style they adopted a process that involved shooting everything at hand and finding out what stuck. Unless the song’s “Summertime III” title is alluding to seasonal sequels, the video provides a contrarian slurry of early springtime visuals.
“The visuals definitely go against the title. But the song is as much about missing Summer as experiencing it. Or waiting for Summer. As you know, we can have a long, cold Spring here in Nova Scotia, and I think the wait for warmer weather makes Summer really grow in importance in our minds. So the song is a bit about things that you’re away from or disconnected from; but that are hopefully getting closer all the time,” says Bates.
“We took the train from Halifax to Moncton during a snowstorm in January, and we really liked the way the footage taken out the train windows paired with this song.”
“There’s something to be said for accumulating a bunch of footage, then going back later to see if you have anything good. Likewise with music—we try to record everything we do, even if we have no plan or no idea what we’re doing. Sometimes you end up with something that’s better than you could have planned.”
While we’re waiting for warmer weather, we can also anticipate the release of Smaller Hearts’ debut self-titled album on Friday, May 18th, 2018.