Electronic duo Tom Howie and Jimmy Vallance of Bob Moses are known for delivering heart-pumping vibes and a growing list of chill tracks since forming in 2012. If you aren’t familiar with their work, press play on the Grammy Award-winning “Tearing Me Up” (RAC Remix) and follow with “Heaven Only Knows” and “Back Down.”
Now that you’re in the right frame of mind, they’ve teamed up with ZHU of “Faded” fame for the title track off their forthcoming EP, Desire, which Domino Records describes as “a love tale for the digital age: all about the positives and pitfalls of humanity’s driving wants, especially in these technology-driven times.”
The song is paired with an animated and interactive choose your fate video, allowing the viewer to visually dive into Sigmund Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” and toggle between worlds of “pleasure” and “pain” while considering desire vs. survival, and the thin line between love and hate.
“I don’t want your desire / I just want to be free.”
Not to get all psychological, but the music itself has the power to get into your head and induce pleasure. But is it possible to feel pleasure and avoid pain? And where does one momentary feeling end and the other begin? One only needs to tap on both “pleasure” and “pain” buttons throughout the storyboard to observe how the two regularly intertwine.
For those not feeling hands-on, there’s a non-interactive version.
Jimmy Vallance shared that “with this record, we’re trying to be self-aware by looking at our own desires and reckoning with them. Desire can become quite destructive if you’re not self-aware. Stories about desire are timeless: Icarus flying too close to the sun and ending up falling to his death…that idea inspired the falling man on the album cover. That symbolized to us how desire can lead to a downfall.”
Tom Howie added, “We’ve appreciated the worlds created in concept records from bands like Pink Floyd and Nine Inch Nails. We thought it would be interesting to combine that kind of songwriting with the flow of modern electronic music.”
Desire is scheduled to be released on August 28, and available to pre-order now.
