Empath announces new album Visitor with a fuzzy, nuanced delight in "Diamond Eyelids"

"Diamond Eyelids" encapsulates Empath’s suitably multifaceted vision, boasting pop melodies with a catchiness that doesn’t detract from the track’s complexity, which bubbles under the surface and occasionally boils over in a woozy synth interjection. Empath make sure that although "Diamond Eyes" is melody-driven, its depth is still maintained throughout in layers of hazy riffs and simple-but-effective countermelody lines.

Vocalist Catherine Elicson’s delivery gasps with understated power, dancing around intensity but keeping it cool throughout, suggesting that there’s more unrestrained moments in store on the album. "Diamond Eyelids"' lyrics are an amalgamation of memories that Elicson blends together with a symbiotically nostalgic tune, calling back to the sunny 2000s indie-punk revolution whilst maintaining an ambitious eye for sonic detail. Minute crackles in vocal production and her quietly impassioned tone come together seamlessly.

"This song was written in a stream of consciousness from a few pieced together memories I had,” says Elicson. “One of coming downstairs at my house one morning and unexpectedly finding a friend who lives on the other side of the country asleep on the couch, and the other memory was of when a friend used to travel from Chicago an hour and a half to the suburbs to work full time at a low paying Americorps job. Collaging memories in a way that created an emotional narrative about reaching for a fleeting moment of connection and familiarity."

“That song has pop sensibilities, but it’s weird and heavy at the same time,” the band's Randall Coon says. “That's definitely something we strive for,” adds drummer Garrett Koloski. “We want to throw all these experimental ideas in but at the end of the day, we want people to be able to sing along to it.”

Of the accompanying (rather memorable) video, Elicson says, "Halle [Ballard] started making all of us and our instruments out of papier mache, which took a couple months. When it came to the clothes we weren’t really sure how to go about making those. I suggested maybe they just stay naked and be babies in a womb, and the whole concept of the video kind of snowballed from that. Halle had a pregnancy suit from a previous project, and we agreed it would take the video to a weird psychological level and also be funny if I were to wear it and give birth to myself and the rest of the band. A lot of Halle’s work deals with mother daughter themes so it just felt like it made sense to go that direction.”

The rest of Visitor’s sonic palate is also ambitious and wide-ranging – “audio was taken from films, Minecraft, a cassette of nature sounds from the Bayou, recordings of an air conditioner, and a church choir heard through the walls of the warehouse we rehearse in,” Elicson says. “It’s a collage of sounds intended to produce a feeling of hearing life through the walls.”