Deep Dive: Postcards – Tenderness

Hailing from the Lebanese capital Beirut, dreampop trio Postcards play with the emotional and sonic limits of the genre on Tenderness. Vocalist Julia talked us through the song and accompanying video as part of our Deep Dive series.

About Tenderness

This is the first single from our upcoming album, which will hopefully be released later this year. I came across a poem called It Isn’t Gentleness by Francisco Segovia one night, and I mistakenly read the whole thing as ‘Isn’t it gentleness’. Then something clicked, and words poured out like they always do, as if I’ve been waiting to say them for months and only just allowed myself to.

Instrumentation

The initial demo was basically a gentle folk song, I just quickly chose a few chords and wrote a melody to have something to send to the rest of the band. But we later transformed it together, trying different versions before settling on the more post-punk feel, since it brought out that hidden angst and longing in the lyrics.

With this album, we tried to record live as much as we could, as opposed to layering. I think you can feel that energy in the recording.

The video for Tenderness

Our friend Camille Cabbabe has been working with us for years now. She filmed the official video for Bright Lights in 2017, several of our live performances, and did a beautifully heart-breaking video for January from our last album After the Fire, Before the End.

We just sent her the song and lyrics, and asked if she had existing footage to edit and use for a lyric video. She’s got such great sensitivity to art that without having to explain anything to her, she gets the essence and feel of a song, and manages to translate it so subtly with visuals, highlighting the small, sweet moments in the mundane. This is basically the first draft, we changed nothing.

Where does Tenderness fit within your overall sound?

Our sound falls somewhere under the big dream pop umbrella. Tenderness is obviously more upbeat and more post-punk, but I feel that there’s always that dream pop/gentle feel in our songs, no matter how harsh they may sound.

Tenderness and more music from Postcards can be streamed on Apple Music and YouTube Music or purchased on Bandcamp. For ticket details of their Spring tour, head over to the trio’s Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook feeds.