Watch the video for the new track by The Avalanches "Running Red Lights" featuring Rivers Cuomo

Publish Date
Thursday, 19 March 2020, 1:03PM

Feeling at once meditative and celebratory, “Running Red Lights” is the latest offering from The Avalanches. Featuring the unmistakable voice of Weezer front-man Rivers Cuomo, the track finds Cuomo in a single-minded mood, emotional – “I’m a thundercloud, ready to burst like Schrödinger” – and running red lights to reach his lover. Set against The Avalanches’ ghostly dreamscape, Cuomo sounds as though he’s speeding along a cosmic highway, while synths, harps and tambourines swell, sparkle and cascade all around. Enter Pink Siifu, incarnating the words of the late, great David Berman (lifted from the Purple Mountains’ tune “Darkness And Cold”) and clairvoyance seems to hang in the ether.

Robbie Chater: “Initially we didn’t see this song as a potential single, but Rivers responded to our fuzzed-out Spacemen 3 inspired jam with such open-heartedness, that it transformed it into something that demanded to be heard”

“I really loved that wide-eyed, elated, almost evangelical Los Angeles sense of possibility that he tapped into. Rivers understands that bittersweet equinox between happy and sad that we are always shooting for. A feeling that comes from, well really, Brian Wilson.”

“David (Berman) wrote to me often through some dark, dark times and really pulled me through. We began talking themes and lyrics for this record a few years back. We wrote of musical spirits, ghosts, and the way music, mysteriously, inhabits a room. It lingers.

"the record listener and the musician, like the stargazer and the star, like a man and his familiar ghost, do not inhabit the same world, this is the premise of their intimacy. Their two worlds are not tangential, but coextensive" - Evan Eisenberg.

It’s a sad feeling releasing this now, 6 months after his passing, but I’m glad he got to hear the song and it meant a lot to me that he really liked it.”

“Running Red Lights” is accompanied by a music video directed by three-time Emmy nominee Greg Brunkalla, who previously worked with the band on their clip for “Because I’m Me”. The video features dancer/choreographer Erik Cavanaugh and a cameo by Angelyne.

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