PREMIERE: Young and Heartless are trapped in boredom for the “Misery on Misery” video

Central Pennsylvania four-piece Young and Heartless is adept at cathartic rock — digging up those heavy emotions and insecurities and exorcising them through atmospheric guitars, loud drums and dynamic songwriting.

We heard this all over the band’s 2016 LP Stay Away, and today the band provides a compelling visual for the album’s haunting midpoint — the two minutes of pensive piano and expressive vocals heard in “Misery on Misery.”

The band says the song in itself is an existential crisis, a meditation on feeling unfairly trapped in a body you don’t have a choice in occupying. “The video we created tries to capture at least part of that feeling,” says Young & Heartless in a group email. “It portrays being trapped in boredom, and we created a Purgatory of sorts with duplicates of ourselves paired with items of no real meaning. That same 6×8 box repeating itself over and over, and the occupant unable to get comfortable.”

It’s an alluring and surreal dreamscape, but it was created with relatively simple means — drummer Jake Lepley and his bandmates shot the video using an iPhone 6 in his apartment, turning a small closet into a stage and shooting hundreds of 10-second videos. Eventually, the band says, “we began to experiment with the idea of defying gravity. We then manipulated the scenes so they appeared to be interacting with one another. It ended up being a fun project, regardless of the numerous hours Jake had to put into editing and re-editing the scenes.”

It’s immersive and surreal, and pairs remarkably well with the melodic and lyrical tone of the song. Watch “Misery on Misery” below, and catch Young and Heartless on tour with Kississippi this month. Dates can be found below.

Tour Dates
Feb 03 Denver, CO @ 7th Circle
Feb 04 Kansas City, MO @ Records With Merritt
Feb 05 St. Louis, MO @ Chill Dawg Cove
Feb 06 Jackson, MS @ Offbeat
Feb 07 Nashville, TN @ The End
Feb 08 Atlanta, GA @ Masquerade
Feb 09 Columbia, SC @ New Brooklyn Tavern
Feb 10 Raleigh, NC @ The Radio Shack