Kevin Bronson on December 15th, 2020

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A couple in the throes of young love spend some quality time together in director Noelia Estrada’s video for Elle Belle’s “Red Light Blues.” A rainbow even makes a cameo, surely a providential sign that as the song does its delicate dance between world-weariness and promise, hope is winning.

“When I heard the song, it made me think of two things — sunny L.A. days before the pandemic and teens in love,” Estrada says of the video, which stars Lola Bonfiglio and Kaden Rizzo. “I thought of Kaden and Lola because they just radiate sweetness and I wanted to see what it felt like to live in their world for a while.”

The song offers a dreamier moment on Elle Belle’s new album “Post Everything,” which finds songwriter Christopher Pappas sorting through the ennui, personal and societal, of the past four years. The album, which came out in November via Little Record Company, the label run by Rilo Kiley bassist Pierre de Reeder, shifts slyly through decades of pop and rock styles. As his past two albums, 2018’s “No Signal” and 2016’s “Wako Gumbo” demonstrate, Pappas’ muses are many.

While “Post Everything” dissects recent history’s “nihilistic wasteland” (his words), Elle Belle manages to find bright spots. There are rainbows, always rainbows.

||| Watch: The video for “Red Light Blues”

||| Previously: “Everyone Knows (But They Won’t Tell You),” “No Signal,” “Straight As an Arrow,” “Knock on the Light,” “Failed Dreamz”

||| Also: Stream the album in its entirety