Ahead of the UK and European tour this September, Half Waif rounds off the visual elements to her recent album with a stunningly beautiful video to accompany the closing track.
“Ocean Scope” closes ‘Lavender’ with dizzying effect and has now been brought to life with a clip that echoes imagery found in the visuals accompanying the album, directed by Kenna Hynes and starring Half Waif’s Nandi Rose Plunkett.
Plunkett comments: “The video for Ocean Scope was treated in the same manner as the song – that is, as a closer, a bookend. Ocean Scope (the final track on Lavender) is an ultimate ending after an album full of talk of endings. The lyrics deal with confronting death, likening it to the onslaught of a loud sound before the song devolves into instrumental chatter. The track eventually resolves on a major chord as a sentiment of acceptance. To follow this structure, the video starts and ends on a salt marsh, where the land meets the ocean, with the first section occurring at dusk and the final section at dawn. What happens in the night in between is a spiritual reverie, a walk through the ego and revisiting of past selves.”
About Half Waif
Half Waif began in 2012 as a vehicle for the thoughts, stories, and songs of Nandi Rose Plunkett. Since then, alongside bandmates Adan Carlo and Zack Levine, Half Waif has created a powerful sound that’s designed to be both immediate and experimental — song structures that shift and interlock underneath swells of synth, surges of percussion and undulating melodies upon which ride waves of intricate vocals. Lyrically, Half Waif traverses complex emotional landscapes. Influenced by Nandi’s Williamstown, Massachusetts, upbringing as the daughter of an Indian refugee mother and an American father of Irish/Swiss descent, Half Waif’s songs are forever searching to understand what it means to be truly “home.”
Opening a new era for the project, this new album expands upon themes of travel and leaving home to include connections Nandi forged with the women in her family and was named for her grandmother Asha – a nod to the lavender she would pluck from her garden and boil on the stove.
“‘Half Waif on defiant form and using the full breadth of her songwriting talents.”
– 8/10, Loud & Quiet (Album of the Week)“In Half Waif’s quest for some kind of calmness they’ve actually made an album that, inwardly, burns furiously.”
– NME“This record is a seamlessly beautiful and intoxicating affair.”
– 8/10, Clash“As raw & organic as the tender subject matter she brings to light, Plunkett’s music is bracing in its nakedness.”
– GoldFlakePaint“Shimmery, glittering hypnotic pop showers this intimate new album… Breathless imagery with dynamism.”
– Aesthetica“A striking album of beautifully rendered and deeply layered synth-pop.”
– 7.8, Pitchfork
