Midnight Prisms sparks nostalgic feels with “Picture of the End”

The LA native Midnight Prisms serves a double portion of pastel-coloured nostalgia with her latest single “Picture of the End,” premiering today on HighClouds.

A photograph falling off the wall symbolizes the end of a relationship between the couple whose two-dimensional selves keep on smiling happily as gravity pulls the picture to the ground: “It crashed without a sound.” The Californian sun will take a while to fade the colours away, and the person who’s been hurt will need even longer to process the pain and let go. “Picture of the End” is for the most of it a comfort tune packed with smooth synths and upbeat drums, but at the same time has a lingering tinge of dreamy sadness built into its structure.

There are two kinds of nostalgia chasing each other’s end throughout the song. One stems from the lyrics consulting the weight of a discontinued relationship, and the other transmits through the form – the lo-fi sound which fuses smooth jazz with eighties pop, picking up bits and pieces of contemporary synthwave along the way. Alicia Beck clearly enjoys coming up with fresh ways to emulate the sound she grew up listening to, and to this day she can be found recording on the same kind of 4-track tape recorder that was long considered vintage when she was making her first demos in the mid-2000s.

Like the grain of a 35mm film photograph, Beck’s taste for playing around with older gear seems to lend her music cinematic qualities. She’s brought this skill to pretty much perfection on “Picture of the End”. Every next note sounds like a fresh burst of pastel pinks, washed-out violets and mint greens flooding your inner vision. Close your eyes for a moment, and you will find yourself in one of those charming eighties’ interiors, or could that be the set of some eerie romance? Make sure to open them again before the colours become too vivid and the chorus “I’ll never stop loving you” begins to sound Lynchian in its spookiness.

Listen and pre-save the track before it goes live everywhere tomorrow.

Natálie Zehnalová

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