Velvet Starlings – “HG Wells” [Video]

LA’s Velvet Starlings have dropped a new single, “HG Wells.” The track is off their forthcoming new album Pacific Standard Time which is being released on August 11. The single is a boisterous, uncompromising vision, politically and musically. In the accompanying video produced and directed by Jake Webber (part 2 of a story arc), the band’s frontman, 20-year-old Christian Gisborne, goes back in time to kill the past version of himself – providing a neat, ridiculous, and kind of shocking metaphor for the song’s cacophonous chorus. He shares, “The goal of Velvet Starlings isn’t even for people to like it – it’s for people to hear it. I’d rather listen to something objectively bad than something that doesn’t make me feel anything.The goal for me is to make people feel something.”

Pacific Standard Time is the follow up to 2021’s Technicolor Shakedown. Five years in the making, the new album is a musically vast gut-punch – a swell of unusual samples, melodic left-turns, and devastatingly incisive lyricism – and marks the debut of a newer, sharper iteration of Velvet Starlings. Initially tracked with Joel Jerome (Cherry Glazerr, Sloppy Jane, L.A. Witch) and then re-tracked in part and re-mixed by Christian, PST introduces Gisborne as one of his generation’s most compelling front persons and premier studio tinkerers, a bandleader who pays as much attention to recorded innovation as to live impact.