Video: Geographer, ‘Hollow (Do You?)’

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Geographer (Photo by Monica Reyes)

“My mouth was just running / I didn’t mean what I said,” Mike Deni sings on his new Geographer single, “Hollow (Do You?),” which calls out all the empty words people say to one another. 

“This song is about all the bizarre things we say to the people we love the most, that we don’t even mean but in the moment we are so utterly convinced of their righteousness,” the singer-songwriter says. “Basically, it’s the great struggle of being a person. This song asks the question, which I wish people asked themselves much more frequently: do you really mean that?”

With its soaring chorus and tasty guitar solos, the song is from Geographer’s highly anticipated album, “Down and Out in the Garden of Earthly Delights,” which originally was scheduled for a late 2020 release but will now arrive Nov. 12 via Nettwerk. It’s the fourth full-length and the first since 2015 from the synth-pop artist, who, after being based in San Francisco for a decade, decamped to L.A after writing his sterling 2019 EP, “New Jersey.”

It’s one of a handful of co-writes on the album, this one with Evalyn (who recently released her own new EP, “I Love You, Keeping Going, Pt. 1”). “‘Hollow’ was just languishing as an instrumental track on my hard drive for years, and the second she heard it she just started singing the melody over it,” Geographer says. “Before we knew it, I had an entire song that was not on my radar at all, but was now potentially my favorite of all of them.”

The video was directed by the visual arts duo The Valdez. “It’s very unique in the way they layer text and images,” Geographer says. “At this point vaccines were getting rolled out, but the world wasn’t quite open yet, so we had them come out to my house in the canyons, and we walked around in the hills behind my house. I put on my best desert-colored clothes, fluffed up my hair, and we just sort of roamed around up there filming, with them directing me while we went. The video ultimately speaks to the alluded to the theme of the song, the inner vs. outer worlds we live in.”

||| Watch: The video for “Hollow (Do You?)”

||| Previously: “Slave to the Rhythm” video, “The Other Side,” “Alibi,” “Slave to the Rhythm,” “When Will I Belong,” “Just Wanna Dance,” “Summer of My Discontentment”