Premiere: With Post-Punk Catharsis, Catcher Releases Their Music Video for “Behind A Bleeding Heart”
COMMANDING AND POETIC, BROOKLYN'S FINEST POST-PUNK PROJECT — Catcher managed to become a prominent rising act after only a year in New York's music scene. Founding members Austin Eichler and Wilson Chestney solidified Catcher's six-piece existence by touring and recording new songs around the city, efforts that would later forge into their first project, The Fat of a Broken Heart. The band has already formed a cult following and been praised by the likes of NME, who added them to The NME 100: essential emerging artists of 2022. Catcher, although inspired by similar-sounding outfits such as The Fall and The Birthday Party, employs a wide musical arsenal from free jazz to noise in crafting their essential sound.
The Fat of a Broken Heart, the band's debut LP, released in February this year, deals with the same overarching themes of their single, "Behind A Bleeding Heart." On the 10-track allegory, frontman Austin Eichler moans his carefully crafted prose about the life and decay of the human body. Death, although a natural and inevitable process of all living things, is daunting and bleak, which is wholly communicated in Catcher's post-punk sound. The band moves fast, their moves chaotic and calculated, expelling energy from their bodies and instruments to create catharsis through their metallic and hounding sonic atmosphere.
Four months after the release of their first album, Catcher continues to reap the benefits of their labor. Today, they release the self-directed video for "Behind A Bleeding Heart," one of the final singles for The Fat of a Broken Heart. The video is a flickering red nebulous of the band's studio performance with splices of camcorder-captured extreme close-ups, mirroring the thematic content of the single in a three-minute visual escape. The dark haziness rivaling against the zoomed-in shots of the band's faces, mouths, and eyes captures an artistic perception of the finality of death that lies behind a bleeding heart.
Members Austin Eichler and Zach Mezzo sat down with Luna to talk about their band's voice and success, as well as the single behind their new video, "Behind A Bleeding Heart.” Read their conversation below.
LUNA: You guys have gotten a lot of praise early on in your career, especially being on The NME 100. What has that been like for you guys?
AUSTIN: The NME thing has been really interesting and weird, because they kind of were in our corner pretty early on and have just continued to show us love, which is cool.
ZACH: Yeah, even right around the time when I was first joining the band, I saw that there were, like, a few articles talking about the demos, which were made before we recorded the album before I was a part of the group, very early on. That was a cool thing to see. And then, of course, all the NME stuff is just really exciting. Kind of gives you a little push to keep it going.
LUNA: I feel like the timeline of your guys' career has also been really fast, especially in the past year. Has that been a lot to get used to?
ZACH: It has been kind of a whirlwind, just because it's been a year or two almost to the day of when I first met these guys. It has been kind of crazy for us to do a good amount of touring and record this record in a pretty short amount of time.You know, a lot of other bands that either I've been a part of or we're friends with, they've kind of developed over a few years or have known each other for a really long time. It's almost nerve-wracking in a way because we were still kind of looking for a chance to get to know each other as people and as musicians… I think it'll be nice to kind of take some time to really get to know each other as we write new stuff and just keep trying to grow.
LUNA: Your band has garnered a lot of attention from your live shows, specifically. Is the band dynamic any different now than before you started touring?
AUSTIN: Yeah, we came together as a group really on that first tour because we hadn't spent a lot of time playing together before then. I’d only played like a handful of shows and just, like, rehearsing. Zach joined the band right before that, pretty much. So, on that tour [with Been Stellar], we did get to figure out how each member of the band plays individually and how that plays into everything that we're doing on stage. As for how our dynamic has shifted now, I think that's more in the songwriting process. The biggest example recently is to try to make sure that everyone has an equal amount of input and everyone's voices [are] heard, musically, so to speak.
LUNA: I feel like being a “New York band” is a big part of your draw. Do you think the city influences your music in that way?
AUSTIN: Yeah, I think so. I think especially — [and] I can only speak to what I did for the songs — but I think, lyrically, New York [had] a lot more touchstones from other things. It was all real-life stuff that we were going through when we first moved here — at least for me, lyrically. New York did a big part in this last record, and I think definitely will going forward.
I do notice a definite shift in the energy of our band from our prior band in Texas. When we moved here, there was a definite shift in energy just from the city itself. That plays a part in a lot of the bands that our friends are in as well.
ZACH: I think I'm actually the only one in the band who grew up in New York. I didn't grow up in the city, I grew up in Long Island, but I've been living in the city since I was in college. So it definitely feels like home to me. I don't know if there's anything specific about what I've brought to the band that's more “New York” than anything else, but it's definitely my home. So I think I would definitely consider us in the New York band through and through.
LUNA: With Catcher being a six-piece, there is so much influence that comes from each individual. It’s interesting to see what you create out of having that for you.
AUSTIN: There’s a lot of things going on, like what we listen to on a regular basis — it's all pretty polar, which is really cool. We're trying to figure out now how to hone in on our palette with that a little bit. You know, sometimes when we come in to write something out, it's a little bit like the ideas are very different, which is cool. A lot of cool things come out of that. But you have to reel it in sometimes [and] be like, “Alright, what do we want the finished product to be like?”
ZACH: I think the first record is pretty consistent in tone and sound, but because of all those different influences, now we're starting fresh and trying to hone in on what our new sound will be and how that mixes in and compares to what we've done in the past. It's really exciting, but it can of course … be like … a tough challenge. But I think it's worth it because we have a lot of interesting things to say, but we just have to kind of hone in and find exactly what our voice is going to be.
LUNA: Let’s talk about the music video for “Behind a Bleeding Heart.” This video has a similar feel to the video for “Comparing Saviors and Friends.” What do you usually look for when making your videos?
AUSTIN: [For this video,] I was looking at a lot of Ira Cohen photography with mylar film. And We got some $30 huge roll of mylar and we're like, “Let’s just see what we can shoot with us.” We just lined [our studio] in the film and made it kind of like a box and then grabbed some lamps from upstairs. We were like, “Let's just light this and see what we can do.” It ended up being really cool because that was like a funhouse mirror or something in the mylar at times because it would distort, so that ended up being like the principal footage of the film.
LUNA: What can you guys tell me about the single, “Behind a Bleeding Heart”?
AUSTIN: That was one of the first ones we wrote actually as a full group, I think.
ZACH: That was the first song where I felt a real part of the writing process. I feel like we really wrote that one all together. Which felt nice, especially since it ended up turning into one of the singles that we put out. That was definitely a pretty exciting time. It was after we had played maybe one or two shows all together. Then we were sort of writing some more songs before we went out on tour. At first when I started playing with Catcher, I didn't really know if they wanted, like, another full member of the band, or if they just wanted a string player to record on demos or whatever. So it was nice to feel a full part of the group and kind of see a glimmer of what we could do as a full ensemble.
CONNECT WITH CATCHER
SPOTIFY
-
weekly tunes playlist has been updated! new tracks from @furtradeband, @pecqband, @garryfool & more! check it out! https://t.co/ToFU0R6YGo -
-
RT @oliviaborch: new @LunaCollective out todayyy shot by @alltookev ✨ @P1H_official editorial design by me ! https://t.co/cvSCKsWB5D
-
RT @rlyblonde: @AnnieDirusso for @LunaCollective shot by me #35mm #portra800 https://t.co/0UUJSCBGcH
