Exclusive video premiere of ‘Man Listening to Disc’ by Liily, taken from their latest LP, ‘TV or Not TV’.

Today, Los Angeles alt-rock outfit Liily share a brand new music video for their track ‘Man Listening to Disc’, directed by Sam De La Torre. The track comes off their highly acclaimed debut LP, ‘TV or Not TV’. Speaking on the new music video, Sam wrote: “If we do a performance video, we’re not going to do it with our instruments unplugged again. The idea revolves around being honest by showing microphones, tripods, photographers, stills, and camera operators. If we would have recorded the album ‘TV Or Not TV’ on our own, this is representing what that would’ve been like”.

Liily are four Los Angeles musicians — Dylan Nash, Sam De La Torre, Charlie Anastasis & Maxx Morando — who, up until now, were mostly known for their manic and cacophonous live shows. Those performances, alongside a couple of early singles packaged together into an EP entitled ‘I Can Fool Anybody In This Town’, drove the band to some surprising early successes: performing at Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, touring across Europe and the United States, then finding themselves on the cover of Spotify and Apple Music’s major rock playlists. But then, as quickly as they appeared, they seemed to vanish. Almost two years later, and now all of 22 years old, the band returned with their debut album, ‘TV or Not TV’. It is a highly aggressive record, even more so than their early work. But here, they jump from moment to moment and genre to genre, creating an experimental and original set of songs, all more strange and abrasive, but also far more three dimensional than anything they’ve ever done before. It still contains the unbridled energy of those early shows and singles, but feels stripped of anything passive or unintentional.

Ultimately, the album is about what arises when you come from Los Angeles but want to illustrate a different vantage point than what the city seems to represent to the world at large. “There’s a lack of stuff that feels engaging here, but there’s a lot that feels engaging elsewhere and in different times,” says bassist Charlie Anastasis. “We got into the Birthday Party, into the Fall. Also really into Moss Icon and Unwound. We can’t escape LA so we wanted to make something that felt just as engaging but that came from here specifically.”

“We’re really just chasing a sound,” says singer Dylan Nash. “I think the people who are going to like this record are going to understand the aesthetic and the ones that don’t are not going to like it. It’s very take it or leave it. But it was important for us to create this aesthetic of our own. We didn’t know what we wanted so we spent a long time developing it. That was us training our ears a bit. Diving into more art and learning. We got older, developed as human beings. We learned how to write together. You know somebody for so long but to learn to work with them is a completely different skill. That process really contributed to each of us just being able to let go, let loose, careless about the abstract and more about the big picture.”

The result is a twelve track record that really does feel singular and strange. It’s very aggressive without it feeling like just a punk band. It’s a bashing, free wheeling sound that’s then very buttoned up-maybe self serious at points so it feels like kind of art school but not done by art school kids. The idea being that it makes sense by listening to it. It makes sense without a definition.

Headline photo: Eva Pentel

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