Soft Palms broadcast insistent energy on multiplicitous "Radio"
Mostly dormant since their dreamily psychedelic self-titled LP released during the liminal pandemic days of late 2020, Julia Kugel and Scott Montoya return as Soft Palms with “Radio,” a new single that broadcasts nervous energy with ticking time bomb insistence.
Radio has long been use as a metaphor for connecting disparate souls, ephemeral and radiating outward all directions, a wellspring of emotions invisible and accessible by anyone with a transistor receiver curious enough, or lonely enough, to tune in to the voices echoing across the expanse. Elvis Costello saw radio as a means of mass salvation and a tool for unification, but Soft Palms takes a different approach.
Built around brisk percussion and a bouncy riff expanded by just enough reverb to introduce an element of schizophrenic multiplicity, “Radio” oscillates with an anxious momentum that presses against itself like hands splayed across invisible barriers of one’s own construction. Kugel’s distinctive sing-song vocals tease and prod, simulcast from both hemispheres of the brain, colliding on the hook to coalesce into a weapons-grade earworm that burrows itself deep within the psyche fueling the creeping paranoia of auto-isolationism and the crossed wires of relationships on the disconnect.
Soft Palms forego traditional broadcast channels in favor of a YouTube-only release that reinforces track’s conceptual framework of being voluntarily disconnected from the persistent machinations of the outside world. Infrared imagery introduces a view into an inverse reality as Kugel and Montoya perform from claustrophobic confines, both in the construction of the room itself and the tight, jittery camerawork of the gloriously DIY video that barely contains the duo’s high-strung dynamism. A litany of affirmations is projected along the walls, spilling onto bodies and faces like the glow of a smartphone in the dark as the words bleed over from the physical world through unblinking retinas, osmosed directly onto the surface of the mind. Mirrors refract Kugel and Montoya into a closed loop array of self-referential duplicates, fragmented facets of the individual rendered upon reflective planes, captured behind glass like self-portraits on private exhibition.
Check out Soft Palms’ self-titled 2020 LP on Spotify. Follow the band on Instagram.
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