JIL’s “Emotional Heat” makes you think twice about checking your phone

JIL’s quietly been part of New York’s downtown scene for a few years now, working with some of the city's brightest like Onyx Collective, Wiki, and Princess Nokia. The first time I’d heard them was a few summers ago, when they were playing as guests at one of Onyx’s performances at the jazz collective's super-lowkey NYXO space, and it ruled. The three piece’s soulful sound is stunning, the lead singer crooning over lush, effect-drenched guitar riffs and beautifully blippy and trippy synths and drums. Today on The FADER, the band is premiering their live performance video for “Emotional Heat” It was “the first song we released as a group,” JIL shared over email, that finds them coming “ full circle with our first album, Emotional Heat 4a Cold Generation, [which is] out in June.”

The video, made with the help of Washington, D.C.’s House Studios, finds the band performing the the slow-growing track on a rooftop and inside an alternately white light and red-drenched raw space. On the song, the lead singer laments about our generation losing itself in the overwhelming swell of screens and cyber personas (“We're awake inside our screens / Sent to sleep in a cyber dream / Are we really here?”), and is fittingly backed by wild and almost galactic guitar solos, stirring chords, and synth sounds that feel like they’ve been sent through satellite. It’s beautiful. Watch and listen to “Emotional Heat” above, listen to more from JIL on their Soundcloud, and keep up with them on Instagram.