Last month, New York City-based indie electronic trio Occurrence announced their upcoming fifth album, ‘Real Friend.’ Today, we are premiering the new video for their latest single, ‘Opportunity Window.’

Occurrence are Ken Urban (electronics), Cat Hollyer (vocals) and Johnny Hager (vocals), and their newest album, ‘Real Friend,’ began with a hug.

Bandleader and instrumentalist Ken Urban explains, “We were coming out of the pandemic and finally the band was together again in our recording studio. Some edibles were had. And we were talking about friendship. Cat just hugged me for a long time in the kitchen and said, ‘You’re my real friend.’” While friendship isn’t the first casualty that springs to mind when you think COVID19, the trio all lost friends during that time. “Friends ghosted me, people drifted out of my life,” vocalist Cat Hollyer recalls, “and yet here we were, the three of us still making music.” Rather than fictionalize the experiences, the band went personal. “We wrote these songs about each other, about the people in our lives, without any filters,” according to vocalist Johnny Hager. Ken even sat down at a grand piano and wrote music free of any technology other than a microphone and a cassette recorder: “But please don’t think this is our unplugged album,” Ken jokes.

“There was a period when Ken was struggling,” Cat recalls. “I know him to be a creative genius, and yet he was full of all these doubts. I just knew he had to push the haters out of his mind and keep going, and I wrote the lyrics of this song to get that point across.”

From Ken’s perspective, “I had gotten some bad news. I sat down and wrote this music in the studio with some analog gear and software. Given I was so downbeat, I assumed the music would reflect that. But when I played it for Cat, she thought it was startlingly optimistic. She couldn’t believe I wrote it at such a low moment.”