Seafoam Walls share ‘Rapids’ single + video

Miami’s Seafoam Walls have just released their sophomore LP ‘Standing Too Close To The Elephant In The Room’ via Don Dia. The record is a sweeping evolution of the band’s knotty mix of jazz, shoegaze, rock, hip-hop, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms — self-dubbed ‘Caribbean jazzgaze’ — first displayed on their debut LP ‘XVI’ (via Thurston Moore’s The Daydream Library Series). 

Seafoam Walls shared the new album’s final new single and video Rapids. First premiered via FLOOD Magazine, the track’s fittingly aqueous groove carries a murky web of hypnotic mantra-like vocals that give the song a captivatingly contradictory effect of sounding equally comforting and unsettling. Lead singer Jayan Bertrand explains, “Rapids is short for white water rapids. A fast-moving body of water that cares or waits for no living being. I see time in a similar way. Society will progress without you if you get stuck in your ways. It helps to be as fluid as the times allow.”

Rapids: Listen / Watch the video clip via YouTube below

Not only does ‘Standing Too Close To The Elephant In The Room’ showcase Seafoam Walls’ evolution as musicians, but it also solidifies their reputation as boundary-pushing artists, inviting the listener to experience their music through a Technicolor mist of experimental influences and instrumentation. Demonstrating their commitment to full artistic autonomy, the band — rounded out by Dion Kerr, Josh Ewers, and Josue Vargas —  took on the role of self-producers once again, shaping an album that rewards those who revel in its sweeping soundscapes as it delves deeper into questioning the trappings of modern society and all of the contradictions it entails. 
 
The album’s title is a metaphor for the often overlooked but significant challenges and complexities that people face in their lives, and a warning about getting caught up in the details at the risk of missing the bigger picture. As Jayan explains, “Everyone has an elephant in the room; an obvious problem in their life that everyone, including the person affected, knowingly looks past. BUT, I say that one is standing too close because the problem is more complex and their vision is too obstructed to see the bigger picture. So viewers are providing skewed perspectives of the same problem. It’s an illustration of the areas in which intersectionality fails to meet.” 
 
Heady music for heady times. A moment that Seafoam Walls is all too ready to meet. 

‘Standing Too Close To The Elephant In The Room’ track list
1. Humanitarian Pt. I
2. Humanitarian Pt. II
3. Stretch Marks
4. Rapids
5. Hurricane Humble
6. Cabin Fever
7. Sad Bop
8. Ex-Rey