Nature occupies a sizable piece of Riley Pearce’s musical DNA. For his debut album The Water & The Rough, Riley rented a house on the southwest coast of Australia. “I wanted to let the sounds of the house and the environment filter in,” explains Riley. If you listen closely, you can hear the sounds of floorboards, the house’s gravel driveway, mallets thumped on a couch, the metronomic tapping of a friend’s collar bone, the crackling of a fire, and more.
“The Water”, off The Water and the Rough, is a moody and meditative piece that tackles the difficulty of finding yourself in a world where more lines in the sand are being drawn every day. This theme is accentuated vividly by the slightly brooding bass line and communal chant-like melody and vocals in the opening, eventually segueing into the light for the second half of the song as if Pearce me be starting to figure out where he fits in the grand scheme of things. Accompanied by a visually striking, cult-themed music video produced by Cedric Tang, “The Water” is a rich and compelling sampling of what the rest of the album holds.
“We wanted to lean into the song’s concept but bring in a more cult-like collective mindset to represent the struggles so many of us have in finding solace and the often sheep mentality that comes with carving out success in the music scene. The song is very much divided in two. After chatting with director Cedric Tang about the way we’d film the music video, we wanted to highlight the bass – stuttering to match it with zombielike movements from the actors…..The moment we hit that water though it was a real battle to control the teeth chatters, it was a great team to work with on this video and I’m super proud of how it turned out.”
