Portland artist King Yosef has produced tracks for Ski Mask the Slump God and the late XXXTentacion, he’s got a collaborative album with Youth Code, and now he released his own new album An Underlying Hum. It was recorded and mixed by Converge’s Kurt Ballou, and much of it is in abrasive industrial territory, but “Pulling At A Thread” finds Yosef exploring more of a somber, haunting, folk music side, and we’re now premiering the video for that track. Here’s what King Yosef tells us about it:
The conception of this song really started a long time ago for me. I had really felt that yelling was starting to feel very two dimensional to me and like I couldn’t express everything I was trying to say via that channel anymore. Fast forward to the latter half of the album writing process and I kind of just stumbled into this song. I hadn’t been playing guitar very much and decided I should use as many irregular (for what was King Yosef) elements as I could. I was listening to a lot of Massive Attack, Boards of Canada and Mark Lanegan in this time frame. All I knew is, I wanted the actual instrumentation like guitars and drums to be very simple and to just build and build on the depth and texture through synths and soundscapes to make it feel like you’re in a cave while this song is playing. Lyrically this song is about the intersection between organic and inorganic things, clashing at the center of the psyche. A big analogy for nature vs. nurture, and how much of ourselves is born like this and how much of it do we inherit. I didn’t fully answer my question but I got to let a lot of the grievances go.
The video was directed by George Douglas Peterson and King Yosef. Watch it and stream the full album below.