Mirror Ritual Unleash Single / Video 'Fear In All'

Te Whanganui-a-Tara's Mirror Ritual (formerly known as Transistor) grace our Friday with 'Fear In All', unleashed for all to hear on the first day of their five date Eyegum Scenic Tour with Ōtepoti's Porpoise. Rightly marrying a love for timeless folk-inflected songcraft with overdriven psych-fuzz sorcery, Mirror Ritual's new single launches with equally mesmerising visuals directed by Hunter Blair and made with support from NZ On Air. Proving that table tennis competitions are always an A+ music video move, the stylishly shot, action-packed clip depicts the band's Lochie Noble, Eli Polaczuk, Mia Kelly and Riley Dick battling it out for supreme victory at their hometown's Vogelmorn Bowling Club — including a pivotal training sequence filmed in the vast expanses of Te Ika-a-Māui's Desert Road. Hit play on the drama and the glory, and don't miss Mirror Ritual tearing it up with Porpoise at San Fran tonight...

"Back when we first started working on the song, I was still relying heavily on reverb, delay, and phased guitar to carry the songwriting. The song was hiding behind all of this for a good while, so I decided to peel it back and lean more into its ‘chamber-pop’ qualities. We added layers of mellotron flutes, strings, autoharps and nylon guitar that really brought it to life. There’s a good amount of weird sampling and more off-kilter recording tricks going on too, which is a nice contrast to the more composed instrumentation.

('Fear In All' is) mainly centred around our collective uncertainty of the future, and how popular culture seems to relentlessly mine the past, instead of cultivating new, exciting and risky modes of expression that reflect our rapidly collapsing world.

Themes of competition, ego and betrayal stuck with Hunter... Naturally, the world of table-tennis is fertile ground to explore all of this and was a great way to weave humour into the video. Despite hours upon hours of practicing my bat-to-ball coordination the night before shooting, it took many, many tries to get even one usable take out of me, all of which is a testament to Hunter’s patience as a director." — Lochie Noble

Eyegum Scenic Tours #2: Mirror Ritual (Wgtn) and Porpoise (Dun)

Friday 19th August - San Fran, Wellington
Friday 16th September - Whammy Bar, Auckland
Saturday 17th September - last place, Hamilton
Friday 30th September - darkroom, Christchurch
Saturday 1st October - The Crown Hotel, Dunedin

Tickets available HERE via UTR

'Fear In All' is out today on major streaming services.