Photo credit: Jimmy Fontaine
Toronto, Canada-based post-punk/alt-rock artist ThxSoMch sinks into nostalgia on the unrelenting, equally hard and soft “Sound of You Laughing” out now via Atlantic Records and captures the wistful longing of flipping through old photos in its matching music video.
The latest commanding track took shape after musician Flawed Mangoes sent the artist various instrumentals, whose evocative guitar riff became the song’s foundation. After playing around with them and sending them to collaborator LMG for drum additions, ThxSoMch was so inspired, he freestyled nearly the whole song in one go. The artist shares, “I recorded it the next day and couldn’t stop listening to it. It sat on my computer for a while until I revisited it with grayskies while making more music. ‘Sound of You Laughing’ is both comfort and discomfort.” Defiant and uninhibited, each line is delivered with the slight twinge of pain that comes with digging up the past.
The matching heartfelt video was created backwards, built around looking at old photographs and embodies the undeniably captivating guitar riff. On the video, director Tommy Kiljoy recalls, “The whole goal was to nail that super specific feeling: that liminal nostalgia you get from seeing old playground photos. We really wanted to bottle that up in the visual. We played around with all these exterior lights to match that sound, I’m genuinely so in love with how this video turned out; it just perfectly clicks with the song’s energy.”
