New Video: Always You Share Woozy, Bittersweet “1994”

Los Angeles-based duo Always You — twin brothers Christoph and Anton Hochheim — have managed to forge their own path while working alongside a hive mind-like collection of musician friends, including Beach Fossils, Wild Nothing, The Pains of Being Pure At Heart, MGMT, Jerry Paper, The Depreciation Guild and a lengthy list of others, which has helped shaped the siblings sonic identity along the way. Formerly known as Ablebody, the Hochheim Brothers have spent their careers exploring lo fi hypnagogic laptop pop, sophisticated synth pop informed by 80s UK and Japanese New Wave, as well as kitsch-en sink lounge ballads inspired by the great chansons.

The Los Angeles-based duo’s third album, the Jack Tatum-produced Against The World is slated for a November 13, 2026 release through Hit The North Records. With Jack Tatum at helm guiding production and mixing, he tirelessly broke down and then reconstructed all the elements of the material with the twins, pushing the album’s overall sonics to the absolute breaking point while still retaining their signature sophtisipop sheen. Throughout the album’s run time, heavy guitars and bending sheets of white noise clash over frenzied hi-hats and The Prodigy-like sub bass. Abrupt starts and stops seemingly crash down with the weight of the world. Drum ‘n’ bass and house beats thump over soaring melodies and chopped up vocal samples. The ballads seemingly sparkle with more heart and tension than anything in their previously released work.

Thematically speaking, Against The World is a statement for and against the times: a manic manifesto drawing a line in the sand, pointing out that love is the only resistance against the forces manufacturing distance and endless dissent between us. It’s a rallying cry pushing for something better, a staunch refusal of the status quo, fueled by the belief that we all deserve much better. The album’s material is rooted in the deep sense of longing for something, hell, anything else than this — a different reality, an alternate timeline, anything. Increasingly divorced from the world around us, the false promises of a new lover, a new leader, a quick and seemingly effortless salutation or a new savior become impossible to resist. That fantasy leads us further and further underground, leaving miles of rubble in its wake and keeping us all just out of reach.

Against The World’s second and latest single “1994” is a bittersweet meditation on time’s inexorable march forward, aging, lost youth and lost opportunities and the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia pushing us to dream of a simpler world that never really existed. But when the world is seemingly running down, there’s a strange comfort in looking backwards isn’t there? Sonically and thematically, “1994” seemingly channels Smashing Pumpkins’ “1979” sounding as though it could have been released in — well, 1994 while underpinned by some old school craftsmanship.

“‘1994’ is a song about clinging to specific times and seeking refuge in them, often to moments that never really existed,” the Los Angeles-based sibling duo explain. “We live in a world that deals nostalgia as currency, where the past is constantly viewed through rose tinted lenses, with our youth put on a pedestal and the continual quest to return to that version of ourselves always just out of reach. We long to return to the simpler times before life pulled us from each other and ourselves, before our hardships and tragedies calloused us to the world, back to a time that only ever existed in our minds.”

Directed by Alex LaLiberte/Otium, the accompanying video for “1994” is a woozy and panoramic visual that touches on the song’s overall themes of rose-tinted nostalgia for at time before everything seemingly went bonkers — even if it was kind of bullshit to begin with.

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