Brooklyn’s Hypoluxo understand their music: what it does, how it works. The brooding post-punk of “Fronts,” whose video we’re premiering today, is as dark and gloomy as the southwestern suburban street on which the video takes place. We see a guy in a vintage Penny Hardaway jersey shooting hoops in his driveway, his out-of-date glasses and general stringiness telegraphing how this thing is gonna go before he even takes the first shot. But he’s not in on the joke, of course, and his private frustration—the semi-conscious sense of dread and failure that’s always present and always at risk of boiling over—is mirrored by the song, which begins with a hope-againt-hope jangle and grows darker from there. “It’s funny when you dress to impress; he never even looks at you,” go the opening lines. “You’ve got nothing to prove—and nothing to lose.”
It’s in that slight turn that the song and the video find their power. Despite the low-level self-loathing, all the airy sadness in the space where ambition once lived is actually a space of freedom; put less abstractly, when a dream dies, another dream is free to be born. Hypoluxo send “Fronts” into the depths, where they capture that intermixing of regret and opportunity, and even if they don’t quite make it back to the surface, it’s moving to hear them begin the ascent.
