Los Angeles indie electronic rock trio Sir Sly recently released a music video for “&Run”, the second single from their sophomore album Don’t You Worry, Honey (June 2017). It draws from the same conceit of the music video from their lead single “High”: all three band members perform slick yet relatively undemanding choreography, with vocalist Landon Jacobs being placed front-and-center. (There is also an epilogue that comments on the duplicities of the artist-record label relationship).
The track proves to be another catchy empowerment anthem that subtly traces the path from tragedy to life-affirming positivity. Their debut album You Haunt Me (2014) was heavily inspired by Jacobs’ mother brain cancer diagnosis (she passed away in March 2016), a loss compounded by his recent divorce. “&Run” makes an oblique reference to Jacobs’ marital woes (‘You could be a happy bride and we could still be blissfully in love/ Instead of being 25 and already feeling like you have had enough/ You could be my one regret, infinitely spiraling me down’), but its eclectic gospel-inflected blend of hip-hop beats and electronic rock has little time to spare for the ‘“what if”s and “what if not”s’.
The song’s cathartic, forward-looking message appears to be inspired by Jacobs’ childhood in an Evangelical Christian household and his experience in performing devotional anthems for a mega-church band. The unmistakably uplifting message of personal triumph is only made more effective by a sense of how this newfound momentum is hard-won, achieved only by a deliberate attempt to break free from the emotional shackles of the past: ‘ Heavy as the setting sun/ Oh, I’m counting all the numbers/ between zero and one/ Happy, but a little lost/ Well, I don’t know what I don’t know/ So I’ll kick my shoes off and run’. This is the kind of head-clearing, adrenaline-pumping and endorphin-surging experience you need to create a greater distance between you and your troubles.
