Ernest Greene has detailed his fifth album as Washed Out. The artist will share Notes from a Quiet Life on June 28 via Sub Pop.
Following 2020's Purple Noon, the 10-track Notes from a Quiet Life was borne following a 2021 move from Atlanta to the Georgia countryside he grew up in.
A release explains how Greene's new digs, a former horse farm, have offered him a "purity of vision," shaping creations ranging from this new album to planned large-scale visual art experiments. It's also the first Washed Out album that's been wholly self-produced.
"The Hardest Part" arrives today alongside the album news, and you can hear the single below alongside a video directed by Paul Trillo.
The clip was created using Sora, a yet-to-be-released artificial intelligence model from OpenAI that creates videos from text input.
Director Trillo shared in a statement, "I had the seed of this video concept 10 years ago, where we do an infinite zoom of a couple's life over the course of many decades, but I have yet to attempt it because I figured it'd be too ambitious for a music video."
Lauding the "surreal and hallucinatory aspects" of AI, he continued, "Using AI to simply recreate reality is boring. I wasn't interested in capturing realism but something that felt hyperreal. The fluid blending and merging of different scenes feels more akin to how we move through dreams and the murkiness of memories. While some people feel this may be supplanting how things are made, I see this as supplementing ideas that could never have been made otherwise."
Trillo noted, "An overreliance on [AI] may become a crutch and it's important that we don't use this as the new standard of creation, but another technique in the toolbelt."
"I think that Paul is right when he says that this video could only be made using this new AI technology," Greene added. "In my opinion, the hallucinatory quality of Sora clips feel like the beginning of a new genre unto itself — one that is surreal and unpredictable and entirely unique to traditional cinema or even animation."
Pre-order Notes from a Quiet Life.
Notes from a Quiet Life:
1. Waking Up
2. Say Goodbye
3. Got Your Back
4. The Hardest Part
5. A Sign
6. Second Sight
7. Running Away
8. Wait on You
9. Wondrous Life
10. Letting Go
