Five years after we last heard from the New Zealand–formed indietronica outfit The Naked and Famous, the project’s vocalist Alisa Xayalith will be releasing her debut solo album, Slow Crush, tomorrow. Before then, we’re getting one final taste of the collection with another new single titled “Alone with You” that further defines the personal aspect of these songs as opposed to the material Xayalith put with her band. “Like a lot of the songs on my album, I was writing about the experiences I was living through at the time,” she shares of the new track, an introspective capsule of longing that balances minimal acoustic balladry with a lush burst of sound in its chorus.
“I was stuck in New Zealand, waiting for my US visa approval,” she explains of this individual song’s origins. “What’s usually a two-week wait time ended up being three months; I was filled with anxiety over the possible outcome of being denied and having to leave my entire life in Los Angeles. The night before my writing session, I called my partner in LA. He was out at a party, so our conversation was kept brief. We’d kept missing each other because of the time zones. I was forlorn and fed up with my entire situation and wrote ‘Alone with You’ the next day.”
With the theme of transportation in mind, the video for the single was mostly shot in a car tunnel in downtown Phoenix by filmmaker Brandon Black. “We were inspired by scenes in Wong Kar-wai’s film Fallen Angels,” notes Xayalith, joining a long list of peers inspired by the Hong Kong art film director. “We loved the moody, romantic nostalgia of the motorbike scene, with our scrappy DIY attitude and tiny budget. We decided to shoot the majority of the video for ‘Alone with You’ out of a car window, and it turned out to be one of my favorite music videos we’ve made.”
Check it out below, and pre-order Slow Crush here. Additionally, Xayalith will hit the road with Sunday (1994) later this month—find those tour dates here.
