Svalbard share “Faking It” music video; announce new album “The Weight Of The Mask”

Svalbard have announced their fourth studio album “The Weight Of The Mask”, out on October 06, via Nuclear Blast Records. Along with the announcement, the band have premiered the song “Faking It”, with an official music video.

Vocalist/guitarist Serena Cherry spoke:

If the previous record was about facing your demons, then ‘The Weight of The Mask’ is about fighting them with everything you’ve got. You can literally hear the depression transform into aggression in these songs. ‘The Weight of The Mask’ was admittedly a challenging album to make because we cut so deep this time around, it was a painful but ultimately cathartic process. This album is the sound of two years worth of internal darkness boiling away inside and then finally being unleashed.

‘Faking It‘ is a song about feeling deprived of meaningful human connection due to depression acting like a wall that shuts you off from others. It addresses the ways in which those who suffer with depression can feel guilted into putting on a happy mask. The lyrics are a reflection on happiness as a social obligation and how scarily good you can become at deceiving everyone around you into thinking that you’re fine when you’re not. With ‘Faking It‘, we are both acknowledging the pressure for forced positivity, the fear that people won’t like you if you’re sad, and also questioning where the root of this intolerance towards depression lies.

This video leans on deliberately obvious binary oppositions to hammer home the message of the song. We have the glossy smiling shots, filmed in the fakest place we could find: The Selfie Factory; mixed with dark, expressive performance footage that represents the internal struggle within.

You can watch the video below: