We’re proud to announce The Fourth Wall’s single Never A Part is out now! Read what Stephen Agustin from the band has to say:
Never A Part was inspired by a visit from my grandmother. During the writing of this upcoming record, I was trying to learn more about my family’s history. It took me an embarrassingly long time to become curious about the story behind my family and how they ended up in the States. The discovery of some of the past traumas they endured prompted me to also question why the silences surrounding their history became the status quo.
During her visit, my grandmother and I exchanged a few obligatory phrases in each other’s language (I am as unfamiliar with her language as she is with mine) and the absence of knowledge about each other was palpable. It brought to the surface this question about what the driving force behind the family relationship is and how affection is maintained even in the absence of a means of communicating with each other. Do the gaps preserve and maintain the love even?
Never A Part is sort of a fictionalized monologue by a person who has fled their place of origin to have children in a new world, knowing that they would acquire new and unfamiliar cultural norms. The logic of exchange is at work here. “For my grandchildren’s prosperity, I give up the means to know them (and for them to know me).” This gift of self-erasure for the sake of a loved one is at the heart of the song.
With the music video, we wanted to play with the difficulty of representation more broadly. In the video, memory is created then destroyed in one continuous shot. The people in the video act as if they are fulfilling a duty to create images of a certain kind and they comply just as obediently to the order of destroying images that don’t meet the criteria. The video attempts to bring forth the theme of self-erasure in the song.
Label