Around this time last year – OK, exactly at this time last year — Fleet Foxes fans found themselves blessed with a brand new album. Shore was something of a surprise for listeners, who didn’t know that Robin Pecknold had been busy crafting the follow-up to 2017’s Crack-Up and finished it during quarantine. To celebrate the one-year-anniversary of that auspicious release, the band are sharing a new video today for the track “Featherweight.”
Like plenty of their visuals before now, the animated clip was created by Robin’s brother, Sean Pecknold, an impressive artist in his own right in the visual world. The “Featherweight” video was actually directed by Robin and Sean together, and these animation visuals have long been a part of the band’s storytelling aesthetic. The visual follows the story of a hawk with a broken wing, and becomes a larger story about success and second chances.
“When I made the first Fleet Foxes video using clay stop-motion, I fell in love with the tactile quality of the technique and never looked back,” Sean said in a press release. “There is something really special about creating animations in the real world. The process is more physical and more immediate than clicking away at a mouse and getting red-eyed.”
Watch the “Featherweight” video above.
