Grouper Announces New Album, 'Shade' and Shares New Song 'Ode To The Blue'

Liz Harris is the talent behind sound project Grouper. The Portland-based musician is most known for her melodic looping tracks that are, one could say, the sonic embodiment of a Paul Clipson video.

Though she hasn't shared music under Grouper for what seems like forever, she has just released a tender love song, Ode To The Blue, and announces her highly anticipatory new album, Shade, set to be released this October.

Accompanying the song, Harris has released a video directed by Dicky Bahto, featuring an appearance from Julia Holter. The video is, what feels like, an ode to falling in love; with the whole video being lovers cooly embracing each other... kissing mostly.

In a press release, Dicky Bahto said:

"Liz [Harris] sent me a love song in the middle of the worst part of the pandemic in Los Angeles to think about making a film for. I was depressed and scared and felt incapable of thinking. She mentioned picturing people kissing; and “maybe something in a graveyard.” I wanted to see my friends. I wanted to feel intimacy again. I thought: What if the film is just people making out in graveyards?

In Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights I found myself surrounded by graves for people who, like my own grandparents, had survived the Armenian and Assyrian genocide a little over a hundred years ago. After a year of fear over the pandemic, growing support for right-wing authoritarianism, and the escalating climate crisis—with a popular narrative that we’re living through the end of the world—I needed the reminder that the end of the world is always happening somewhere, and even if we don’t survive the end of our world, we might as well enjoy the pleasures of love. Watching my friends kiss was a hot, fresh breath direct from their mouths that made me feel a joy I hadn’t experienced in far too long."

Find Ode To The Blue here.