Premiere: Big Little Lions stand on the right side of history with new visual, ‘Choose Forward’

2020 is a year of awakening, a long-festering reckoning that hangs like hot acid in the air. “History will repeat itself / If not us then who else,” broods folk-pop duo Big Little Lions. Always ones to confront matters of the heart and of humanity, musicians Helen Austin and Paul Otten address their own white privilege amidst a decaying world. “Can’t make the dying make us numb / Excuses only make you look dumb / I choose to shut up and learn,” they sing, voices tangling as barbed wire.

“Choose Forward” bookends the pairs new EP, Are We There Yet?, and its flame-throwing lyrics are sharply direct. “Tear, tear it down / Then, raise it up so we remember / Push, the poison out of the wounds that only fester / And I choose forward,” Otten and Austin carve out the abscess of society with a lingering blade.

Simple lyrics are hardened within a driving, yet unwaveringly organic, framework. Their voices lace up with a resolve to never again sit on the sidelines; instead they’ll listen and fight for what is right and true. “This is a song we were compelled to write. As the pandemic developed into the BLM movement, so did our songwriting. As white people we cannot stand idly by,” the band writes B-Sides & Badlands over email, “and one of the few ways we know how to help is by creating music.”

The accompanying lyric video is appropriately straight-forward, pushing the lyrics into the viewer’s face so they won’t soon forget. “We want to support the voices of the oppressed and this is a time where we have to take sides. A time to choose which side of history to be on. The video was created to reflect the feeling of the song with the images upon the lyrics in your face.”

Big Little Lions will also be donating a quarter of the proceeds from various online concerts to Black and Indigenous youth programs.

Watch below:

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