Clothing, includes members Aakaash Israni (Dawn of Midi) and Ben Sterling (Cookies, Mobius Band). The duo, recently announced their debut album, From Memory, will drop on July 26th. They recently shared lead single “Still Point (feat. L’Rain)” with an accompanying video created by Luke and Nik. Featuring contributions from Amber Coffman, Elliott Skinner, Anna Wise, and L’Rain.

Clothing is the collaboration between friends Israni and Sterling, who met over a decade ago on the stoop of a Crown Heights house party and became close friends. Sterling is a born and bred New Yorker who came of age marinating in pop music, while Israni is an Indian-born, SoCal surfer who studied classical composition in France and free improvisation at CalArts. These different backgrounds and interests created a productive and surprising friction: when the two began sharing musical ideas, it turned out Israni didn’t know what a chorus was in popular music. “I had never even considered how a pop song was constructed,” says Israni. Sterling had much to learn from Israni, too—especially about the intricate Ghanaian music that inspired Dawn of Midi’s Dysnomia and that soon came to underpin the unexpected rhythms of From Memory.

Today’s new single is the rippling “Still Point (feat. L’Rain),” which follows the previously released “Kingdom (feat. Amber Coffman)” and “Modern Interiors (feat. Anna Wise).”

As Sterling explains, “‘Still Point’ is a song about love and devotion, and the fear of losing those things. It is a banal, cruel fact that love is so self-evidently what life is about, yet it opens us up to visitations from the worst horrors imaginable. There are so many ways to lose something irreplaceable: breakup, serious illness, plane crash…Any time I’m reminded of this, I fill with terror: ‘It’s a long way down to the bottom now.’”

“After we heard L’Rain’s beautiful performance, we went back and rearranged the chorus to give her voice even more space,” says Israni. “That’s how we ended up with such a bare, almost solemn first chorus compared to the more ecstatic second. She chose this song right away and brought so much pathos to her performance. Her wordless outro vocal is sublime.”

On working with Israni and Sterling for From Memory, L’Rain adds: “Sometimes singing can feel overwhelming or scary, but not this time: it felt really liberating to record this music and to have Ben and Aakaash trust me to put a little bit of myself into it. I’m so grateful!”

Creating From Memory stretched out over 10 years, through the birth of children, cross country moves, and the painstaking search for the aforementioned vocal collaborators. “We learned that it’s incredibly hard to imagine a voice singing a song that it hasn’t sung yet, says Sterling. It was like casting a dream. And though the process stretched over years.”

Portions of the above text were pulled from a bio written by Emma Cline.

Clothing
From Memory
Tracklist

1. Kingdom (feat. Amber Coffman)
2. Afternoon Television (feat. Amber Coffman)
3. Paper Money (feat. Elliott Skinner)
4. Still Point (feat. L’Rain)
5. Something Out Of Nothing (feat. Elliott Skinner)
6. Everything Is Free (feat. Amber Coffman)
7. Modern Interiors (feat. Anna Wise)
8. Sunset? (feat. L’Rain & Elliott Skinner)

Pre-order From Memory HERE