On August 24, 2018, Rubblebucket released a new album, Sun Machine. The album documents the troubles experienced by Kalmia Traver and Alex Toth over the last few years, which ranged from Traver’s ovarian cancer diagnosis in 2013, Toth’s struggle with alcoholism, and the indie-pop duo’s break-up after a years-long romantic relationship. Now, the pairing has released an inventive new music video for “Lemonade,” which was inspired by the couple calling it quits.
“Lemonade” was written by Toth from Traver’s perspective, offering both an optimistic meditation on the future and a dissection of the grief felt after the uncoupling. As Toth explained to Billboard, which premiered the new music video:
The more and more I go into the songwriting craft, the more I’m like, ‘I am not really deciding too much. I’m letting my subconscious drive what the song is going to be,’ … And I was like, ‘Whoa, okay, that’s what you’re doing? That’s what you’re trying to say?’ And I realized as I was uncovering this chorus, I was like, ‘This isn’t me singing to Kal. This is definitely Kal singing to me. This is definitely not a Toth song. This is definitely a Rubblebucket song.’
The music video is in an interactive, 360-degree medium, allowing fans to manipulate the viewing screen throughout the performance by pointing and dragging, hitting the arrows on the player or using the W, A, S and D keys. The video features multiple focal points, which feature surrealist clips ranging from a woman licking an ice cream cone to the band dancing together to a trumpeter playing while rollerblading. For the innovative video, Rubblebucket returned to their frequent collaborators, director Julia Barrett-Mitchell and director of photography Alex Suber. Watch Rubblebucket’s “Lemonade” below:
