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Penelope Isles shot the Thinking Seat video in a few hours with no budget. It opens album 3

Penelope Isles shot the Thinking Seat video in a few hours with no budget. It opens album 3

The sibling indie-rock duo Penelope Isles have released a video for "Thinking Seat," the first single from their third album, 3, out September 25. The video shows Lily Wolter wandering around her native Brighton with a battered white chair — her "thinking seat" — while her brother Jack shakily films her. SPIN ↗

The song grew out of their own experience of riding in the family van and being unable to stop thinking, worrying, replaying things over and over while still holding it together. When it came to shooting the video, the ambitions were high, the budget essentially zero. "Over the years we've shot a lot of our own DIY videos, so we wanted to come up with something that stands out," says Jack Wolter. SPIN ↗

The original idea was simple — Lily sits in the chair and sings while they walk around the city. "Deep down we both knew it wasn't that visually interesting, but we only had a few hours, so we went out and did it anyway," Jack admits. SPIN called it the art of the anti-music-video: the result works precisely because it doesn't pretend to be anything other than what it is. SPIN ↗

Penelope Isles have been active since 2015 and belong to the quieter wing of British indie rock — their strength lies in the sibling duo's two-voice harmonies and in guitar textures that shift from a whisper to a wall of sound.



Illustrative photo: Penelope Isles. Photo: Paul Hudson / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

Geographic locations

Location: Brighton
Brighton, Brighton and Hove, England, BN1 1HJ, United Kingdom
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Music 👤 commons 👤 jack 👤 jack wolter 👤 lily 👤 lily wolter 👤 paul hudson 👤 penelope isles 📍 brighton 🏢 thinking seat 🏢 wikimedia
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