Boombox Blitz: Beta Radio do some ‘Realistic City Living’

Welcome to Boombox Blitz, an artist spotlight series showcasing overlooked singers, songwriters and musicians who are quietly taking over the world.

Darkness never lasts forever. In our journey through the various layers of humanity, rising from a wide-eyed, still wondrous, young kid to a cynical adult, who still may not know anything about anything, we often find ourselves shrouded in seemingly unconquerable voids. That’s what indie-folk duo Beta Radio examine with their single and video “Realistic City Living,” an airy, riverside ballad about their own treks from birth to life. Many of the songs from their new album are appropriatley linked together with “a common lyric,” the band says.

“The void will close” serves as a transitory manifesto, situating the song’s splendidly lavish visuals as a makeshift vital organ to their craft. “[It] is a phrase I couldn’t get out of my head for nearly two years. It’s a two-part idea about the endings and beginnings of all things,” singer-songwriters and musicians Benjamin Mabry and Brent Holloman explain. “It refers to how all voids, from supermassive black holes to those we carry inside our own hearts, will one day close.”

The rejuvenation of nature, presented as the backdrop for their storytelling, a location one hour north of New York City, pulses in their veins and quakes in their bones. “I arrived on Earth in no form of my choosin’ / Born a spirit to a womb in a room that’d soon consume me,” they paint, both melancholic and bright. They later remark, pulling together the threads of the album’s moniker, “You’re a spirit in the ancient transition / Searching for New Jerusalem / Lost in human condition.”

The river ripples in satisfaction, cleansing Mabry’s and Holloman’s skin, even from a distance, and the breeze rustles across the countryside in sweeping curves. The locale of an old iron-ore mining community gives the song a remarkable profoundness, as Beta Radio learns from the past and the cycles of life, packing away wisdom into nap-sacks for safe keeping. “I love the otherworldliness of the location and how beautiful all the images look since it was all shot on film,” they add.

“Realistic City Living” is from Beta Radio’s new album, Ancient Transition, out now.

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