It’s happened to all of us at one point or another: You’re going out with some friends to get burgers and you wind up in an encounter with a celestial being by the side of the road. Yet as far as I know, New Zealand’s Pickle Darling is the first songwriter to set this intimately familiar experience to music with their new single “Invercargill Angel” providing layers of swirling instrumentation to soundtrack the event after repeating the line “I hope he makes you feel at home” over banjo and a mounting series of blipping loops. “I came up with the kind of repeating mantra bit on a long drive and just sang it in my head for an hour so I wouldn’t forget it,” shares Lucas Mayo, the brains behind the project. “It came together reasonably quickly, maybe the quickest song on the album to write!”
In case that repeated lyric didn’t drive home the intended angelic imagery, the Aimee Cooki Martin–directed video replicates Mayo’s DIY approach to songwriting with found-footage horror (/romance?), opening with the words “this really happened”—which, as with Fargo, makes it indisputably a true story. “Me and my friends got some burgers and went to hang out on the beach to celebrate the album being finished, and I have no memory of what went down—but luckily my friends captured it all on film…”
The track is set to appear on Mayo’s new album Laundromat—their first for Father/Daughter Records—and at double the runtime of lead single “King of Joy,” “Invercargill Angel” leaves plenty of space for the bedroom experimentation to expand in several directions at once before fading out to an ear-splitting hum. Check out the video below, and pre-order the album here.
