Deadmall & Rothstein Release “take me back to august” from New Collaborative EP

Deadmall and Rothstein are close personal friends, and it was only right that they became musical collaborators as well. Today they’ve released a new song, “take me back to august“, an appropriately named track for the first week of September and the de facto end of the summer.

Deadmall is a Western Massachusetts-based pop duo, consisting of Gabe Gill and Honeyfitz. Rothstein is a Boston-born artist who’s music is more steeped in hip-hop and R&B. Seemingly at opposite ends of the musical spectrum, their styles mesh nicely, trading inward-looking verses on the solemn but upbeat ballad “take me back to august“. The song serves as the focus single of their 3-track EP – DEADMALL + ROTHSTEIN – which drops in full this Friday.

Deadmall and Rothstein also made a lyric video for “take me back to august”. Gabe of Deadmall shared some insights into how the lyric video came together:

“I made parts of this video using a technique I started messing with during my ill-fated tenure at art school- using my phone camera to film or photograph something on a computer screen and then putting that captured content back onto the screen to photograph again and create a refracted, softly warped and pixelated image. This always felt most evocative to me with source imagery of nature, forest fires and rainbows – things wild and sometimes inexplicable. For this video, this feels like an analogy to the way we (myself, Honeyfitz, Rothstein) are all looking back on memories that get gently distorted every time we write about them, and reflecting each other’s themes and words through our own lens. Much of the Deadmall+Rothstein project feels like it just arrived in one form, but the source material was created by years of holding onto memories, rearranging and accentuating them subconsciously, and then attempting to detail them to people who live outside of our brains.”