Ahead of the July 12th release of Honestly, Smaller Heart’s second album, the band have released “Circuitry.” The latest single from husband and wife duo Kristina Parlee (The Maynards/The Reference Desk) and Ron Bates (Orange Glass/The Memories Attack) tackles the repeated patterns of our lives and, inadvertently, some of the more mundane challenges of existence.
Much like Smaller Hearts’ past video for “Summertime III,” the video for “Circuitry” was created using DIY footage — a retracing of their steps again and again through season after season.
We all fall into patterns in our lives. They’re familiar and comfortable and keep the neighbours from peeking into our windows every two weeks to see if we’ve died. They form everything from the backbone of our thoughts, to the basis for civilization. We could say it’s about time that there’s a song that addresses this directly but, arguably, every song ever written has been either about patterns or when things fail to fall into those patterns.
While the band offer that the song’s title is made in refence to said patterns, they explain it’s also a double meaning — a reference to their electronic instruments, which again, are based on all the same principles. So it may as well be the same thing. It’s just the universe mirroring itself in beautiful fractal symmetry.
With “Circuitry” the band emphasize that’s a good thing. Rather than getting locked into a prison or stuck in a rut, we can find comfort in finding self-definition. They allow us to explore the world within set parameters and discover ourselves within those rules. We are all playing the same game, after all.
That is, unless you’ve been phased-shifted into an adjacent dimension, and then you’re likely to experience molecular collapse. It just goes serves to highlight another benefit of sticking with conventional patterns, really.