Kevin Bronson on May 4th, 2023

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L.A. trio Franky Flowers made a dent on the scene a few years back with their affecting lo-fi noise-pop. Singer-songwriter-producer Franky Fox was just a teenager when he started that project, and now he has returned to releasing music, with the single “Back to Sleep” (b/w “Amissio”) issued last month.

“Back to Sleep” arrives like a fractured fairy tale from the past, a cloud of ’60s psych-pop with a loopy synth and confessional vocals recalling a young Ben Gibbard. Those rambling, opaque lyrics: a bout of sleep inertia or a nocturnal eureka moment? Mesmerizing either way.

For the “Back to Sleep” video, which he directed with cinematographer James Messina, Fox dabbled in projection art. “I’ve actually been interested in experimenting with projection work for a while — maybe it comes from my father being a projectionist in the ’60s and ’70s,” he says. “I had been drawing inspiration from Robert Brownjohn and László Maholy-Nagy’s work when I came up with the concept for the video.

“I wanted to create an effect like a double or feedback loop by projecting a performance on top of an identical performance in the same way, which would smear reality and create this strange analog effect using the natural space. We shot this between the hours of 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. in my living room with the help of my roommates and James Messina — the man behind the camera — using a desktop computer on the sink and a dinky little projector that we operated hand-held. … I’m glad we were able to turn these abstract ideas into a visual reality.”

The songs are the first from an album that Fox has in the works. As they say, stay tuned.

||| Watch: The video for “Back to Sleep”