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Jan 15, 2021 By Christopher Roberts

Melbourne, Australia five-piece Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever released a new album, Sideways to New Italy, last year via Sub Pop. Now they have shared a video for the album’s “The Only One.” Mike Ridley directed the video, which features Pie Man, a man with a giant pie for a face, as he wanders around suburban Melbourne and encounters the band. Watch it below.

The band simply had this to say about the video in a press release: “The places are real, the people are real, the pie is made of cardboard and sticky tape.” 

Read our interview with Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever on Sideways to New Italy. 

Read our review of Sideways to New Italy. 

Sideways to New Italy is Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever’s sophomore album and the follow-up to 2018’s debut album, Hope Downs, also released via Sub Pop. Hope Downs was our Album of the Week, one of our Top 100 Albums of 2018, and our #1 Debut Album of 2018. 

Sideways to New Italy also includes “Cars In Space,” a new song the band shared in February 2020 via a video for the track co-directed by fellow Aussie musician Julia Jacklin with her regular collaborator Nick Mckk. “Cars In Space” was one of our Songs of the Week. When the album was announced they shared another new song from it, “She’s There,” via a video for the single. “She’s There” was also one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared the album’s third single, “Falling Thunder,” also via a video for the track. “Falling Thunder” was #1 on our Songs of the Week list. Then the band released a video of them performing early single “Angeline” remotely and separately from their homes (the song is not found on either of their albums, but was released as a single back in 2013). Then they shared one last pre-release single from it, “Cameo,” which was also one of our Songs of the Week. Then they shared a video for “Cameo.”

The band features singer/songwriter/guitarists Tom Russo, Joe White, and Fran Keaney, as well as bassist Joe Russo and drummer Marcel Tussie. 

The album’s partial namesake, New Italy, is actually a village near New South Wales’ Northern Rivers, which is an area Tussie is from. A press release announcing the album described the town: “A blink-and-you'll-miss-it pit-stop of a place with fewer than 200 residents, it was founded by Venetian immigrants in the late-1800s and now serves as something of a living monument to Italians' contribution to Australia, with replica Roman statues dotted like souvenirs on the otherwise rural landscape.”
 
Keaney had this to say about the album in a previous press release: “I wanted to write songs that I could use as some sort of bedrock of hopefulness to stand on, something to be proud of. A lot of the songs on the new record are reaching forward and trying to imagine an idyll of home and love.” 

Read our 2018 interview with Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever.

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