Seafoam Walls – “A.I.” [Video]

Miami’s Seafoam Walls return today with a knotty new single + live video, “AI,” from their debut album XVI, out November 12 via The Daydream Library Series, the house record label of Ecstatic Peace Library operated by Eva Prinz & Thurston Moore. Today’s release displays the band’s collagic approach to jazz, shoegaze, rock, hip-hop, and Afro-Caribbean rhythms — self-dubbed ‘Caribbean Jazzgaze’.

The band’s name is meant to convey a sort of pseudo-chromotherapy, suggesting a relaxed mood when one is alone with their thoughts in a seafoam green-colored room. But the themes explored are heavy — self-identity, philosophy, navigating today’s crumbling social constructs — and stem from Jayan Bertrand’s online interactions and personal experiences, making him question his and others’ humanity. “When I wrote these songs my worldview was crumbling. A new wave of activism and intersectionality was shifting the way I thought and wrote,” he explains. That paradoxical approach is what makes XVI sound like little else that came before. A collection of songs as ethereal journeys; both the compositions and ideas found throughout explore a myriad of paths that almost never repeat themselves.