After teasing it briefly earlier this week, Dirty Projectors have now shared the full video “Little Bubble,” while it includes some of the trippy Inception style layering, mostly the video is wide, expansive shots of landscapes that are at odds with the video’s reflection on the joy of sharing a tiny, private world with someone else, and not realizing the worth of that at the time. It’s not particularly hard to suss out who David Longstreth is pining over here, his longtime collaborator Amber Coffman has recently left the group, and is releasing her own solo album, so it seems fairly clear that the Dirty Projectors record will dwell on her departure quite a bit.
This song, taken with “Keep Your Name” are both backward-looking, pretty mournful songs that fall in line with the Dirty Projectors sound, but they’re slightly more subdued than usual. What Longstreth is processing here — the loss of a long partnership and the unfamiliarity of being alone — is something that I see people my age all dealing with increasingly in the last year or so.
It feels like a lot of millennials or people around my age, right around their mid-thirties, spent a good part of their twenties in committed partnerships that have now dissolved or become something different. I think that’s a natural process, but to watch so many people coping with it at once is an interesting and sometimes exhausting process. Longstreth manages to make his coping sweet and not exhausting, puzzled but not despairing, and this song makes me even more excited for the full album than ever.
Still no word on an official release date, and it doesn’t look like we’ll get one, so keep alert for another surprise drop. Oh, and given the Beats headphones he sports in the video, I think we can safely assume it’ll be coming through Apple Music. Watch the video above.
