Video premiere: Second Still, ‘You Two So Alike’

Kevin Bronson on March 30th, 2017

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The seeds of L.A. cold-wave trio Second Still were sown in L.A. eight years ago when guitarist Ryan Walker met bassist Alex Hartman, but they took root after the pair moved to Brooklyn in 2011. After accumulating a few armloads of instrumental demos, the duo found a singer perfect for their brooding anxiety, Suki San, and the trio were off and running, eventually relocating to L.A. Second Still’s self-titled debut album, a collection of icy post-punk dissonance out April 7 on Paris-based Manic Depression Records, agitates and alarms while clinging to the inscrutable beauty of the genre.

The song “You Two So Alike,” the band says, is inspired by the End of Life Clinic in the Netherlands. “and by an article Suki read about Brittany Maynard, a women who decided to commit suicide after being diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, a few years ago.” Recruiting friends to help with cameras and lights, they used a DIY approach in making the video for the song: “We just wanted to have fun with it and do it the way we wanted rather than have some pre-packaged video that we weren’t even involved in creatively,” they say. “We see a lot of professional videos where the band probably has no say in the way the video is even going to turn out, so our video was kind of a reaction against that.”

||| Watch: the video for “You Two Are So Alike”