Toronto’s Carbon Memory brings the misty, ambient pulse of the UK’s early aughts alt-rock of Doves and Coldplay into 2022 on their latest single “The Only One”. Drawing from a range of influences from early Coldplay to Phillip Glass, the band creates a huge sound right from the start and still finds room for clever dynamics and subtle composition. “The Only One”, of the band’s recently released Tourist EP, is set to a visually stunning galactic video animated by the band’s lead guitarist Demian Abal and hand-drawn by vocalist Dennis Neves.
“The Only One” explores the struggle to prioritize the pursuit of creating music over other needs, relationships and realities. “It’s about negotiating and protecting creative energy in our lives, seeing creativity as something that needs to be nourished. The further you grow apart from it, the further you feel from yourself” the band explains. The video animation for the “The Only One” reimagines this introspective battle as a space voyager’s one-way journey to the center of the universe in search of something meaningful. On their way, the traveler navigates through deep space, unknown planets, encounters slimy creatures, experiences spaceship technical malfunctions, and faces what at first glance appears to be a kamikaze fate. “We wanted to keep the ending open to interpretation. Is the whole experience a dream, achieved self-realization or the result of creative sabotage?” The animated video took about a full year to complete. “Everything was hand-drawn, digitally colored, and animated painstakingly using Adobe After Effects. It nearly broke us. The video is as much of a representation of the song as is the final studio recording.”
