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Music

High Bloom Are Great and Their Video for "Laundry" is Too

It's like watching a memory of one of the best nights of your life.
Emma Garland
London, GB

I remember the precise moment I became familiar with the name Caroline White. It was at the beginning of 2013, I had a Super Fun Emotional Breakdown™ that knocked me out of work and university, and for two months I spent the majority of my days eating cereal out of a saucepan, reading a lot of questionable novels about simulated realities and watching Community. I also spent hours and hours and hours on Bandcamp, inhaling anything tagged with "lo-fi" or "Philadelphia" as though, if I stopped, I would just shut down on the spot like a remote control that someone grabbed and slapped the batteries out the back of. There were a number of things I discovered at that point that have stayed with me, but one thing that really jumped out, like blood on snow, was Flowers – a two part release from Caroline White's largely acoustic bedroom project Infinity Crush.

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Bare-boned and vulnerable, Flowers feels very much like the process of locating a source of pain, turning it inside out and in doing so, taking ownership over it. The same goes for much of Caroline's other work (including her equally moving writing) and, unsurprisingly, that was especially relevant to my interests at the time. Like I said back in August when we premiered a track from the first Infinity Crush album in three years, Caroline's is the kind of voice that immediately shatters your heart into a thousand tiny pieces; ascending and cutting through everything around it like the sun… if the sun had the ability to sing. From Julia Brown to Teen Suicide to her latest project High Bloom – a collaboration with her friend Hans Hoffman – Caroline has consistently been involved in making some of the most interesting and meaningful music available. People throw the word "raw" around a lot in reference to music but you'd be hard pressed to find a more appropriate use of it than here.

The first High Bloom release, Haloed, came out via Orchid Tapes (responsible for putting out Alex G's DSU, Ricky Eat Acid's Three Love Songs and many other defining releases of what can loosely been described as The Great Bedroom Pop Years of 2012 - 2015) and now, thankfully, there is more! Their latest album Implied Sun – a polished and resonant evolution of the blueprint they laid down on Haloed – is on the cards to come out soon. Since Caroline lives in North Carolina and Hans in Baltimore, the pair wrote the whole thing virtually, which is neat. You can brandish that fact like a cultural gold medal whenever a baby boomer tries to tell you that young people are doomed thanks to technology and avocado toast.

You can also watch High Bloom's new video for "Laundry" above, which stitches together dreamy fragments of activity like you're watching a memory of one of the best nights of your life. It literally makes me feel nostalgic for things I didn't even do. Behold, the power of good art.

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High Bloom are also playing August 12 at Gravity Records in Wilmington, North Carolina for those fortunate enough to be in that specific place at that specific time.