Kevin Bronson on September 7th, 2022

0

Ruth Radelet, former lead singer of the Chromatics, ramped up her solo project this past spring with the lush single, “Crimes.”

She returns today with “Stranger,” the lead track on her debut EP, “The Other Side,” releasing on Oct. 7. Between the ornate orchestration and Radelet’s creamy vocals, it’s a song with exceptional gravitational pull, weighted with melancholy yet somehow centering.

“‘The Other Side’ represents a side of my personality as an artist that most people haven’t seen until now,” she says of the EP, made with producer Filip Nikolic (ex-Poolside). “It also represents my coming out the other side of a traumatic experience, gathering what I could from ‘Before’ and figuring out how to exist ‘After.’ This record was forged in the fire of a transformative two-year period during which I lost almost everything, including my father, who was a huge influence on me. Most of the songs were written just before I was caught up in a storm of big changes, and they were all finished just as life started to feel sweet again. It feels right to share some of the last chapter before moving into the next, and though it’s a melancholy record, for me ‘The Other Side’ is a step into a bigger and brighter future.”

The black-and-white video — directed by James Manson and shot on 16mm Kodak film by Freddie Whitman — turns the city of Los Angeles into an art project. “‘Stranger’ is about a specific kind of loneliness that I have only felt in Los Angeles,” the songwriter says. “Although the song is very much about longing, it’s more about a place than a person. The lyric ‘I could never hold you in my hands’ is about the feeling of always being on the outside looking in, of the city never fully opening its doors to me.”

||| Watch: The video for “Stranger”

||| Previously: “Crimes”