In Mourn’s video for the new song, “Call You Back,” the group’s three members, individually, do things we’ve become used to seeing people do in quarantine: exercise, hang laundry, lie around. Mourn taking a different approach to these times. They also take a shower with clothes on and wear tinsel as a hat.
While the making of the video was determined by Spain’s strict coronavirus lock down and its monotony, it doesn’t seem so unusual for a band that was built on high school ennui.
The Barcelona indie rockers were still in their teens when they captured attention with their self-titled 2015 debut album; the band’s next two releases, notably 2019’s Sorpresa Familia, confirmed it was more than a novelty. Mourn has toured the U.S. and Canada four times, something the band of course won’t be doing for the foreseeable future. Concerts programmed in Spain and France from March heading into the summer have been canceled or postponed.
“Music is always an escape valve for me,” Mourn’s Carla Pérez Vas, who is now 23, tells Billboard. “Above all playing live. As I’ve gotten older it’s become something that’s absolutely necessary as a way to communicate. There are a lot of things that my bandmates and I] don’t talk about, we just communicate through the music.”
Pérez, Jazz Rodríguez and Leia Rodríguez (the band’s fourth member, drummer Antonio Postius, left Mourn in 2019), had been planning the video shoot when Spain’s state of alarm was declared in mid-March.
“We had thought about locations like the woods and a pool, or riding bikes, all the time wearing a poker face,” Pérez recalls. “The song is about when around you everything is beautiful, but you have this constant battle going on inside of you.”
Instead of those exteriors, Pérez filmed herself in her boyfriend’s apartment in Barcelona, while the Rodríguez sisters phoned in video from the houses where they are quarantined.
A disconnected vintage phone receiver has a supporting role in the clip, appearing in still-life arrangements with fruit, a dog, bikes and other props.
“Parts of the song talk about the anxiety of phone calls and the emotions around them,” says Pérez, who is now 23. “It’s pretty ironic that now we are looking at the phone all day, and everyone is anxious. If I’m not connected, I feel like I should be talking to my friends or family.”
She’s felt some of that same uneasiness about not being productive while inside: “At first I felt guilty because everyone was saying you had to be creative in quarantine]. I’ve been writing, I’ve done a riff or two, but I’m not forcing myself.”
For now, the band members have posted a cover of The Cure’s “Jumping Someone Else’s Train” and other “acoustic shit” on Instagram. “We like doing that for now,” she says. For the future, “We’ll just have to see what happens.”
Watch the video for “Call You Back:”
