Last month, Jay Watson of Tame Impala and Pond announced his project GUM was doing a collaborative album with Ambrose Kenny-Smith of King Gizzard & The Lizard titled Ill Times. They shared the title track, and now they’re back with “Dud.”
“Dud” was co-written by Kenny-Smith’s late father, Broderick Smith, who was a well-known musician in Australia. “After my Dad passed away in May last year, we never got to properly finish the song together,” Kenny-Smith said. “It only felt right to make the chorus as more of a send off to him. I miss him everyday but I’m so glad I now have this song to remember him by. It helped me process his passing a lot. Dad used to always sign off on his emails and birthday cards with ‘- love Dud x.’”
Watson added, “This one started as a demo Ambrose sent me, with the songwriting all there. I loved the melody and the classic chord progression, and ran about half of the stems through a tremolo, as well as adding some Vox repeater fuzz tremolo, a classic Spacemen 3 trick. It just sounded like Track 1 to me, I don’t know why.”
The bittersweet song comes with a music video directed by Matt Wallace and Jack Rule of Recliner Films. Rule said the video lands “somewhere between happy and sad.” He explained, “Sam, an actor and friend of ours played the role perfectly and, when he started to break into dance, he kind of became this emotional extension of Ambrose who could help share the load of the very real emotional heft of this beautiful track.” Watch below.
Ill Times is out 7/19 on p(doom).
