New York City-based duo Sub Lights, made up of indie-rock veterans Meredith and Stephen Duncan, release their sophomore EP Half-Life. The Half-Life EP by Sub Lights started out as a songwriting experiment. During the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns, the duo challenged themselves to write at least one song per week for a year, beginning in October 2020 and ending a year later. The Half-Life EP is the first of what will be a three-part project to be released from Sub Lights taken from that batch of over fifty songs. 

“The idea was to transform traditionally-written songs, mostly played on piano or acoustic guitar, into our indie-electronic style,” says Sub Lights co-founder Stephen Duncan. “Lyrically, we wanted to try to capture the kind of social melancholy coming out of the pandemic and the Trump years, but then express that in a hopeful way. Like, life is tough and can be really sad, but even then people are amazing and able to find joy by connecting with each other. We also wanted to take our music seriously without taking ourselves too seriously—it’s a fine line, but I admire artists who can pull that off. But also I’m a college history professor and fairly politically active, so there’s always an element of the big picture mixed in there too, grand themes of what it means to be human and all that.” 

“Half-Life has multiple meanings as it relates to the album,” continues Meredith Duncan. “It is one of the key lines in ‘Strange New Breed,’ and it is a way to describe how if you only live in the past or for the future, you miss the present, so essentially it feels like you are only experiencing half of your life at any given moment… It’s also my word for what deep depression feels like. All these missed opportunities, just watching life go by from your bed.  ‘Black & White’ and ‘Rockville’ are songs about the past. ‘Traffic’ and ‘Hell’s Kitchen Sink’ are about living in the moment which is the only time we can experience the full interconnectedness of life, that we are all the same.”

To celebrate the release of the Half-Life EP, Sub Lights have created yet another gorgeous video companion for their new single “Hell’s Kitchen Sink.” The self-directed music video features the duo performing “Hell’s Kitchen Sink” on a New York City rooftop during golden hour while glimpses of a nighttime journey unfold. 

“Like Meredith said, [‘Hell’s Kitchen Sink’] is about living in the present, about valuing the only life we’ve got–and the people we share it with–instead of dreaming about some imagined future afterlife,” continues Stephen. “That has serious social implications, that we have a responsibility to make the world as good as we can both for ourselves and for other people. But we also wanted to say that this includes having fun, enjoying yourself while you can. So the video was our DIY version of that, just us playing, and playing around, shooting it with the help of a couple of our creative friends and having a good time with it.”

Photo Courtesy: ONEiPhotography