Tomorrow we finally get to hear Highs in the Minuses, Canadian songwriter Charlotte Cornfield’s latest LP and the first absolute Predator-handshake co-release between the labels Polyvinyl and Double Double Whammy, in full. Before the big day, though, Cornfield is sharing one last sample of the record which sees her recounting a bizarre dream while musically paying homage to Figure 8–era Elliott Smith, specifically the upbeat acoustic balladry of “Everything Reminds Me of Her.”
“There’s an effortlessness to that song that I love, but also a real heaviness,” Cornfield explains. “I tried to embody that duality on this one. On the demo I doubled my acoustic guitar and vocals, Elliott style, but it quickly became evident that this needed to be a crushing rock song. It had to come to life in the studio. I have one guitar pedal and I cranked the gain on it, and Alexandra Levy [Ada Lea] got this heavy bass sound that’s almost like sludge metal. [Liam O’Neill’s] tambourine playing destroys me. The whole thing kind of feels like bumper cars at a theme park.”
The single arrives with a visual that sees Cornfield crawling, being dragged, and lying motionless in a field before placing herself within the 2-D world evoked by the song’s title. “[Director] Ali Vanderkruyk came up with the concept for the video, which has a loose Pac-Man theme. In it, I’m walking, crawling, and being dragged through linear landscapes: a cornfield, a lavender farm, an apple orchard, a hilly path. I collect objects along the way and then create a maze out of chalk, placing the objects in it and walking away. To me this captures both the fraught nature of the emotions in the song, and the calm of looking back at them from far away.”
Check out the video below, and pre-order the album here.
