"I’m a big guy, but...I’m not afraid to tell someone I’m vulnerable as fuck like anybody else," James Kelly, former metal frontman turned experimental singer-songwriter WIFE, told FADER last month. His debut solo album What's Between came out via Tri Angle on June 9th, and I've had it on constant rotation for that exact reason: it's an emotional bulldozer of a record, taking an unflinching look at what closeness and distance do to bodies and the souls that rattle around inside them. The first video to be unveiled from the record - created in collaboration with visual artists Fiona Garden and Ben Ashton - takes this theme and runs with it, getting uncomfortably up close and personal with a flexing male torso, its awkward contortions dragging a sense of vulnerability and strangeness out of an image stereotypically associated with strength. Kelly's face is projected onto skin as he deadpans the album's top line, about the heart "filling up the space between ourselves." His lips are on the surface, but the words sink straight to the bone.
