We’re a little less than a month out from the release of Gauche’s debut album, A People’s History Of Gauche. The DC band has shared two tracks from it so far, “Running” and “Pay Day,” and today they’re sharing another one, “Flash,” the album’s opening track and its longest, a jam about reflections and refractions. “A flash collapses the depth of field/ A flash collapses all that we feel,” goes the hook. The song comes along with a music video, directed by Tenley Tapes, who also did their “Conspiracy Theories” video, and it’s a spiritual extension of that one, all fuzzy VHS aesthetics.

Here’s a quote from Daniele Yandel about the track:

The flash of a camera flattens a scene. It makes the colors pop, but it also makes reality 2D. To see true depth, you have to wait for your eyes to adjust to the darkness. You can’t cheat time. That’s what a flash is: a way of cheating time and vision, and like all attempts to cheat, it cheapens the experience. It distorts the depth and detail of the scene captured. To truly take it in, you have to wade into the darkness and wait. Slowly, the scene lightens of its own accord, and the shadows appear. Shadows reveal truth. Shadows are how you see when you’re really in it.

The enormity of this world, our experiences, can only be inferred, implied by the edges of the frame. All that minutiae that the shadows draw out in layers upon layers suggest their smallness but also their ubiquity, their countless repetition in so many other scenes beyond this one just out of view. It is the shadows, the edges, the things that block and obscure our view, that show us the most. The elevated view, the flash, the horizon, the lines that lead onward—they are the things that deceive.

Watch and listen below.

A People’s History Of Gauche is out 7/12 via Merge. Pre-order it here.