Nat Harvie has shared a new single, ‘Shovel’, lifted from their forthcoming album New Virginity. It arrives alongside a video made with Hollis Sparhawk and featuring Harvie’s mom Nancy Sudak. Watch and listen below.
“I was a certain kind of child, now I call upon the intensity of fear, euphoria, hope that a child can experience,” Harvie said in a statement, continuing:
I made this video with my friend Hollis Sparhawk. Hollis is a visual artist and musician in Duluth, MN where I am from. I have wanted to make a film with her for a while, but it felt like a sign when we realized we have the exact same shitty camcorder. A month or so later I saw a picture of my mom, Nancy Sudak, with short hair in the early ‘90s, around my current age, looking over her left shoulder toward the camera, making a face that I might make, looking exactly like me. She used to look like I do now. Maybe I will look like she does now in the future. When I saw the picture I was looking into the past at my current self. With this video I wanted to mirror that experience into the future- her as my later self, me as my current self. With Hollis’ help we shot the video in about two hours, both styled as some sort of alternate reality pop star version of myself. We film each other in the video. We sing into microphones plugged only into each other’s microphones on a short cable. We create a mirror-signal that cancels itself out on the way through the cable to reach the other singer/other self. “Shovel” deals with childhood in a new way for me. I have sometimes participated in the popular queer trope of writing to the younger self to say “It’s okay, there is a way to be, there is a good future you can’t imagine with people in it.” “Shovel” is different. Here in the video the relationship is flipped – the younger self takes care of the older self, instigates catharsis, becomes the self again. Age and experience are blurred. Childhood becomes the future. My mom tells me that when I was a young kid I used to ask her “when am I going to be a baby again?” – I guess that curiosity remains.
New Virginity features contributions from Low’s Alan Sparhawk, Lala Lala, Brent Penny, and Cole Pulice. It’s due June 7 via Boiled Records.
