Love songs usually get nervous around obsession because nobody wants to admit how close the two can live together. Everybody likes devotion when it comes with flowers, candy, and clean shirts. Start remembering somebody’s freckles individually, and suddenly the room gets quieter.
New York’s Some Days Are Darker explores that uneasy proximity on Memorize You, a song with the posture of romance and the blood pressure of somebody who has been awake far too long thinking about one person. Lear Mason sings, “I want to memorize you, your freckles and scars, the longing in your eyes, the rhythm of your heart,” and the sweetness of the line grows more complicated with each detail. There is love in there, certainly, but there is also the ancient human urge to pin beauty to the wall before it can leave.
A thick, metallic bassline gives Memorize You its physical weight, while the drums tighten the tension and chiming synth melodies introduce a nervous sweetness. Mason’s croon carries the seductive assurance of early ’90s alternative rock, making even the most exposed confession sound as though it has been rehearsed for one particular listener. Around him, Chris Martin and Robbie Williamson build pressure through the interplay of bass, drums, guitars, and keyboards, gradually filling the space his voice initially leaves open. The arrangement gives the song’s gothic romanticism a muscular foundation, allowing its tenderness and possessiveness to press uncomfortably close together. What begins as an intimate confession grows into a feverish rush, increasingly expansive and overwhelming, until desire and desperation become difficult to separate.
The largely black-and-white video gives this fixation a distinctly New York setting, following a woman through Washington Square Park and beneath its familiar marble arch. Daylight smiles and close-ups alternate with nighttime walks past illuminated storefronts, parked cars, and iron railings, while Mason sings to the camera in a tightly framed interior. The repeated attention to her face makes a visual counterpart to the lyrics, collecting expressions as though enough looking might finally amount to knowing someone. But a masked figure brings a more literal threat into view, and her glances over her shoulder become increasingly uneasy.
That unease develops into a pursuit through the streets and into narrow basement corridors, where exposed pipes and bare walls replace the park’s open space. The closing switch to colour brings pursuer and pursued face to face: two women whose similar hair and red lipstick give the encounter the unsettling suggestion of a double. It is a fitting complication for a song so concerned with committing another person to memory, leaving the desire to recognize someone tangled up with the fear of what recognition might reveal.
Watch the video for Memorize You below:
Mason began Some Days Are Darker in 2019 as a solitary songwriting project after years playing metalcore guitar. It has since become a three-piece built around his chemistry with bassist, guitarist, and keyboardist Chris Martin and drummer, multi-instrumentalist, and producer Robbie Williamson. Between them, the musicians bring decades of experience to songs that draw on gothic grandeur, synth-driven alternative rock, and the charged intimacy of noir cinema. Their self-titled 2022 debut introduced a musical world in which longing can become obsession and physical closeness offers no guarantee against feeling alone.
That combination has found a home on stages alongside The Chameleons, Vision Video, and House of Harm, with the trio also touring the US East Coast and Canada with Pink Turns Blue and the US West Coast with Theatre of Hate. Further East Coast dates are planned around the November release of their forthcoming album, Black Box Warning.
Recorded with Dave Catching at Rancho de la Luna in Joshua Tree, California, Black Box Warning expands these concerns across twelve songs about desire and its consequences, making room for love, loss, lust, and the possibility of beginning again. The desert studio, whose visitors have included Iggy Pop, Queens of the Stone Age, and PJ Harvey, provides the setting for some of the band’s most intense and expansive material alongside its most exposed performances. A solo acoustic piece and a closing piano ballad extend the album’s emotional range, bringing the same difficult questions into quieter rooms.
For Some Days Are Darker, the attraction lies in that uncertainty: whether giving yourself over to someone will bring you closer to life or further from yourself. Memorize You makes the surrender sound seductive enough to postpone the question. Learning someone by heart is a beautiful ambition; expecting the heart to survive the exercise unaltered is another matter.
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The post “Every Freckle, Every Scar” — NYC’s Some Days Are Darker Explore the Anatomy of Obsession in Video for “Memorize You” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
