ABOUT THE SONG

Anti-Hero is a song about somebody struggling to find their place in our modern world and its social complexities. Somebody who feels they just can’t seem to get it right.

It was written and largely recorded in one night, when Tessa, Chris (Franklin Mansion) and Darius Timmer got together at Chris’ home studio in Brighton with no plan, just to ‘make some music’. And the song flowed out, like water. Drums were tracked back in Amsterdam with Dan Huijser.

ABOUT THE VIDEO

Tessa: “I felt the song had a really strong, loveable character in it — a person. I wanted to bring him to life. So, meet Henry. A superhero who is haunted by a big mistake he’s made in the past and is doing all he can do set things right again. All Henry really wants - in the end - is to find love.

The video was animated in After Effects, and took up most of my nights from mid January to mid March!”

ABOUT THE SONG

Strange World was born out of that little bass melody that starts the song off. The sound of it, the deep warmth, immediately conjured up feelings of melancholy, of time passed. I couldn’t stop playing it and in my mind the image started to form of a vaste outstretched beach. Deserted, but for one person. This is her place, this is where she keeps returning to. But it’s not real. And so the story started to take shape. The song is about stepping back into an old, fond memory. And though it welcomes you in every time, the more you revisit it, the more you begin to realize how much things have changed. It becomes a reminder that nothing is constant, not even you. And though that can be paralyzing - if you can’t rely on your own state of mind, what can you rely on? - the knowledge of it can also offer comfort. You can’t predict the outcome, you don’t know what life will throw at you… but you can keep your head up and ride the waves as they come. Because it’s a strange, strange world out there.

ABOUT THE VIDEO

Tessa: For the video for Strange World, it felt right to reference the current lockdown situation, but without being too on the nose. The idea was to create a video about a young woman who uses her imagination to evoke magic in the world around her in a situation that could very easily become numbing. In the end, it’s about staying positive and staying playful. Even when that’s incredibly hard.

David: I always look forward to collaborating with Tess on videos and Strange World has turned out to be one of my favourites. We’re both huge fans of musicals so decided it was time for us to use dance in a video, but our goal was to not make it feel like a traditional dance piece, we wanted it to feel like a short film featuring dance. That helped inform the way we shot everything. Opting to go against lots of flowing steadicam shots and movement and instead compose a lot of our framing with static shots or meaningful zooms.

We kept to a very small team, something we did on our videos even before the pandemic. We always want our shoots to feel like a little community where everyone gets involved. The one thing the pandemic did take away though was having Tess by my side, because we always work so closely on all our videos. But we all took it in turns to carry her around on our phones as she interacted from video calls for the whole shoot. In the end it felt like she was in the room with us the whole day. Modern times! Strange World.