Austin’s relationship with psych rock is as legitimate as they come. From the 13th Floor Elevators to The Black Angels and the Levitation Festival, Texas’ cool city surely knows how to keep it echoey, dark, and improvisational. Megafauna is no stranger to this hallowed recipe and over the course of five albums, the four-piece has created expansive musical exercises where each recording tells its own ambitious story.
On April 28th, Megafauna will release its expansive sixth full-length album titled Olympico, where they worked with producer/engineer Charles Godfrey (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, …Trail of Dead, Swans, Holy Wave). Together, they collectively shaped an energetic and diverse record that adds to the Megafauna canon. The album confidently meanders through touches of shoegaze, doomy stoner rock, sludge, and various corners of prog and alt-rock.
Glide is premiering the song and video for “Sometimes Island,” a swirling 60s-tinged throwback number that shows Megafauna’s more playful side. Here, the band makes cinematic innuendo that would fill the screen of a Jean-Luc Godard film. Megafaun proves that no song type is out of the question, as they nab up the spectrum of heavy genres into their own picturesque stew.
“The song came into being while Will, Winston and I were living together early in the pandemic. Winston was playing us lots of bossa nova artists like Astrud Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim, and they heavily influenced the tune. I talked to our friend about filming the video on his sailboat and he mentioned that we’d be sailing near “Sometimes Island”, a land mass in Lake Travis that is sometimes visible, depending on water levels. I thought it was a cool name for a song about love fading in and out of view,” says vocalist Dani Neff.
“Dani’s song made me dream of all things Fellini, Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend and Alice in Wonderland. I knew we wanted to shoot on 16mm and kept imagining Dani inside a tiny box singing to her other self on a sailboat. And we let our world expand into new places,” says video director Vanessa Pla.
