Careful Shares New EP 'Promise / Practice'

Eric Lindley's lo-fi-art-pop project Careful has released its new EP Promise / Practice alongside a music video for its lead single "Promise."

Careful’s first EP after almost a decade without releasing any new music, Promise / Practice is a meditation on loss. A parent loses a child to gun violence, an abuser loses their partner to their own cruelty and ignorance, people young and old face their sudden or eventual deaths. The songs are sometimes disarmingly bare, honest, and personal, sometimes playful, indirect or abstract, but always rooted in the fragility of our bodies and our relationships.

Sonically, the release aspires to the kind of emotional art pop played by acts like Mitski, Perfume Genius, Sufjan Stevens, and Holly Herndon, while each track has its own unique inflection, drawing inspiration at times from the colorful harmonies and textures of Maurice Ravel, the degraded electronic noise of Crystal Castles, and intimacy of Elliot Smith.

The EP release is accompanied by a new video for the albums opener, "Promise". The video combines artist Miwa Matreyek’s collaged projection of AI-generated imagery with live dance from Lisa Gelley & Company 605.

The story depicted by the animation and dance match the content of the song—a parent’s grief as they lose their child to a school shooting—but the music, dance, and video elements push and pull against each other to amplify the tension between the intense grief and dissociation from the experience: the comforts of home and routine are multiplied through AI into something overwhelming, piles of laundry become soft, ominous mounds, an army of identical cabs in the city are both mundane and menacing, setting the stage for the moments of experiencing or remembering the shooting itself, frantic but powerless to change anything.

Speaking on the video, Lindley said, "Miwa and I have been friends and collaborators on various projects ever since we met in school years ago. Back in July she had the opportunity to work with Lisa Gelley and Company 605 and asked me to provide music.

This was a very personally meaningful song for me, but it’s such a hard topic to make work about, I wasn’t totally sure at first that it was the right song for a collaboration. But in the end I think that Miwa, Lisa, and Company 605 ended up making something so much more powerful than the song itself. Watching it still makes me cry."