Chairlift announced its breakup in 2016, but during Caroline Polachek’s time in the band, she maintained a busy solo career as well, releasing albums under various pseudonyms. Now is she readying her first solo album under her own name, and she has shared a video for “Door,” a kaleidoscopic and dreamy new single.
Polachek said of the video in a new Vogue interview, “With most music videos, you shoot four scenes and cut them together at extremely high speeds, but we decided we wanted to do the opposite: to have nothing repeat, so you enter one scene, you really marinate in it, and then you move on and never see it again,” she says. “We wanted the song to feel even longer than it is, so you’ve really been on a journey.”
Polachek also spoke about the album, saying that she has grown a lot since their debut Chairlift album: “With this record, I was really pushing myself to be more honest. Looking back to the first Chairlift record, there essentially weren’t any love songs. I remember thinking that writing love songs was stupid and cliché, and that my job was to not write love songs, because there are enough of them. I guess I’ve gotten older and more sentimental, and I’ve realized that the love song is just the modern equivalent of a devotional.” She also spoke about the meaning of the album, saying, “It’s really just about how a person can enter your life and change its course. Love sends you down paths you never could have imagined, and new worlds open up within that, then new worlds within those.”
There’s no firm word on when Polachek’s debut solo album will be released, but press materials say a “larger solo project” will “be released later this year.” She’s apparently been working on the album for a while now, as she tweeted last August, “i think i’d go insane without getting to collab with other artists on the side while deep in the hole making an album. there’s always a major revelation or lesson. perceived limitations fall away, everything gets clearer!”
Whenever the project comes out, it won’t be Polachek’s first post-Chairlift solo album. That honor belongs to Drawing The Target Around The Arrow, an instrumental album she released as CEP in 2017.
Listen to “Door” above.
