VIDEO: Brooklyn's Best Breakfast Premieres 'Shapeshifter' Music Video

Brooklyn based indie-folk band, Best Breakfast releases their new single, "Shapeshifter" today - enjoy/share via all DSPs. The track is accompanied by a performance music video which premiered by Americana Highways yesterday - watch.

"Shapeshifter" is the second single from the band's forthcoming album, Clap If You Can due June 17. "'Shapeshifter' is a song about life being a giant performance," shared frontman Ben Majest. The music video features Majest performing to a crowd of mannequins.

"The 'Shapeshifter' video was such a nice surprise for us. Clearly it came out of a place of responding to what we've been feeling the last two years, this sense of isolation in performing for no one or performing for ourselves - the visual of playing to an empty theater, then to a crowd of mannequins as empty bodies, and then becoming one...it immediately made sense to me and resonated with that feeling. The irony is that making the video was the most face-to-face project I've worked on since before March of 2020. It was truly a team effort getting the long takes right and moving the mannequins in place so they appear out of nowhere. What a trip."

Best Breakfast is Ben Majest, producer/bassist Ian Romer, and drummer Poyraz Aldemir. While most bands went on hiatus during the depths of COVID lockdown, the trio hunkered down for a period of ultra-productivity. "Our coming together was accelerated by the pandemic," shared Majest. "I was, like, 'we can just live together and then continue to write and compose and make that part of our routine.' So that's what happened."

Although Best Breakfast recorded their debut album, Late 80's Baby, pre-pandemic, it emerged in the summer of 2020. They swiftly followed-up with Seconds later that year, and dream-folk collection Panacea in November of 2021.

Like two of its two predecessors, Clap If You Can was recorded at Majest's home studio in Williamsburg, with Romer producing. The collection continues to explore perennial Best Breakfast themes - the psychology of love; romantic regret, longing, and loss - with both wistful pangs and welcome playfulness.

Where previous albums have delved into Majest's earlier life experiences (plus Panacea's timely pandemic anxieties), Clap If You Can was written in the immediate wake of a seemingly promising relationship that unexpectedly faltered. The gauzy nostalgia and quietly defiant brightness of previous Best Breakfast releases is now joined by a more raw, immediate vulnerability.

Clap If You Can continues Best Breakfast's history of distinctively democratizing their creative process and career arc. By swiftly releasing music while it's first-thought fresh and energized, then leaving listeners to dictate its fate in the public domain, the threesome keeps us all involved. "If I have an idea that I like, I just want to record it," Majest concluded. "And put it out and just let people decide how they feel about it."

Watch the new music video here:

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