Stealing Sheep release their new album Big Wows, due for release 19 April via Heavenly Recordings. The band shared the excellent hyperreal video for the album’s lead track ‘Jokin’ Me’, watch it above.
Held together by Emily Lansley’s bass guitar, Luciana Mercer’s drum kit, Rebecca Hawley’s synths, and the trio’s fabulously balanced deadpan conversational delivery with singalong three-way melodies and then wrap it all in a bubbling synth-pop tribute to dancing on glitter ball dancefloors.
Despite the processed sounds, there’s a down to earth quality to the work of Stealing Sheep that lends their pop music a certain Liverpudlian charm and side-eyed wit. The video is a pastel colours wash of colour, a retro homage to the beginnings of internet and PC technology and taps into the transience and disconnection of living life through a digital world.
Speaking to The Fader about the video, the band say: “Both the song and the video speak a lot about today’s modern culture and how things seem throwaway: love, communication, revealing the disappointments and let downs but also the ephemeral of the delete, trash, emoji digital world. The way you can put up a front on social media, cultivate an imagined life, your best life.
“We teamed up with 8bit video artist Pastel Castle (Emily Garner) from Leeds, who created Stealing Sheep avatars, we became pixelated superheroes in an oversaturated and glitchy platform. It sets the scene for a full series of karaoke videos to be released alongside the album exploring Stealing Sheep in a digital dimension, shifting identities amidst changing cultural moods and millennial paraphernalia. The ‘Do you think about me’ HTML malfunction noting the obsessive nature of social media. It’s a crazy time and it’s challenging navigating through it.”
Running through the whole record is a response to living in a tech era: “We wanted sounds to represent TVs, computers and everyday glitches,” says Bex. “We started to have this feeling that life is like a game and how you can malfunction when you’re blasted with too much information…”
Live Dates
14th Dec: Liverpool, UK– “Kazimer Winter Ball” (Wow Machine Performance)
25th Apr: Glasgow, UK – Broadcast
27th Apr: Manchester, UK – Yes!
28th Apr: Bristol, UK – Thekla
30th Apr: London, UK – EartH
2nd May: Birmingham, UK – Hare & Hounds
3rd May: Cardiff, UK– Clwb Ifor Bach
Image by Simon Webb
