Premiere: Smaller Hearts get playfully furry in weighty ‘Maisie’ video

Pets make life worth living. They add on a whole new layer of enjoyment in life you simply can’t get with a crying, poopy-diapered baby or any number of vices. They’re (sometimes) furry, friendly, huggable and wholly unconcerned with humans and their nonsense. “Getting to know an animal on some level can remind us that life is more simple than we make it out to be,” electronic duo Smaller Hearts stress, reflecting upon their new music video for “Maisie,” premiering today via B-Sides & Badlands. The clip is shot completely on smartphones, so there’s a grainy and immediate sensation flowing alongside dirty synths and phantom vocals.

The song, a cut from their upcoming self-titled album, out later this summer, examines friendship and “the role that good friends can play in helping us through ups and downs,” Nova Scotia musicians Ron Bates and Kristina Parlee share, shedding light on the song’s sobering and pensive tone. So, it only made sense to enlist their two fur-babies, Scout and Penny, two mixed-breed rescue dogs, for the visual, which jumps between winter’s chilly kiss and the hot gaze of summer. “The thing about these two dogs is, they love each other. If you say one of their names in front of the other, her ears will perk up, and she’ll start looking around,” says the duo. “They clearly love playing together, but they also can spend time together separately or relax in each others presence — just like the best human friendships.”

During the album’s creation, Bates and Parlee knew right away they had ambitions to film a couple videos but weren’t exactly quite sure for which song to utilize their two dogs. “We started shooting a lot of video with our phones, basically whenever we saw something that might be interesting. We’d mix and match what we’d shot with different songs, and see what resonated,” they explain. “The original thought was actually that the dog footage would go with a different one of our songs, called ‘U10G,’ that was faster and more frenetic, but it never quite worked. It was kind of energy on energy, and it felt one-dimensional. But when we started to cut the footage along to ‘Maisie,’ it was like, ‘Oh ok, this feels exactly right.'”

“Maisie” is pinned together with a contagious, dance-floor vivacity and carries with it immense “melancholy or wistfulness” and was meant as an introspection, “looking back on a tough year and feeling thankful for the friends who helped you through,” they note. The emotionally-stimulating track is also positioned as “the happiest and most hopeful song on the album. We don’t know anyone named Maisie: the name comes from an engraved dedication Kristina read on a memorial bench in a public park — the dedication’s mix of the sadness and loss mixed with warmth, love and memory really struck her. When we were looking for a name for this song, it came back to mind.”

Previously, Parlee and Bates worked together in a duo called Homo Duplex, which began as “an experiment, almost a game,” they reflect. “We would draw descriptions of song elements out of a hat and then wrote songs based on what we’d randomly selected. The results were all over the map and featured any number of instruments and styles.” That process inspired them to write and record five extended plays, but soon, they drifted toward “a more consistent pattern,” with “no guitars, no live drums, basically all electronic. By the time we were working on this new album, it occurred to us that we were now a different band than we’d been, and it felt right to acknowledge that with a name change.”

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