Video: A.O. Gerber, ‘Hunger’

Kevin Bronson on July 26th, 2022

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To consume or not to consume? Those are the oppositional desires at work in A.O. Gerber’s new single “Hunger,” which the L.A. singer-songwriter sautés into solemn-then-soaring drama in a song with a recipe of wavering synth, some splashy riffs and pristine vocals.

The tune introduces Gerber’s sophomore album, “Meet Me at the Gloaming,” out Oct. 14 via Father/Daughter Records. The follow-up to her 2020 debut, “Another Place to Need,” the album finds Gerber working again with producer and multi-instrumentalist Madeline Kenney. She’s backed by Megan Benavente on bass, Alex Oñate on drums and Lauren Elizabeth Baba on strings, along with a host of guests.

Here, she turns her dreamy, orchestrated folk-pop to an examination of oppositional forces. “I was thinking about how damaging it can be to exist in that binary space of good and evil,” Gerber says. “When we see everything in either/ors, we lose the nuance and complexity that make life rich enough to be worth living.”

“Hunger,” she says, “sort of wrote itself in the midst of a really devastating fire season in L.A. I’d been thinking a lot about the opposing forces of desire and negation, all the different ways we both consume and restrict as individuals and as a culture. I’ve spent so much of my life vacillating between these polarities, making myself small physically and spiritually. I haven’t always had the ability to critique that impulse in myself but it felt good to do that here.”

Young director Vivian Wolfson’s brilliant video riffs on that theme. “This song is lyrically heavy, so I knew I wanted the video to poke a bit of fun at itself,” Gerber says. “All I told Vivian (the director, who — let it be known — graduated high school less than a month after we filmed) was that I wanted cake to be shoved in my face at some point. From that she came up with this absurdly stunning set design and concept.”

Check it out as Gerber chews up the scenery.

||| Watch: The video for “Hunger”