Comprised of Francesca Carbonneau, Nashlyn Lloyd, Samantha Lancaster, and
Zoe Fuhr, FRANKIE is a Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada-based dream based band that can trace its origins to a December 2013 one-off gig, where they had met a few short weeks before. Each individual member felt an instant and undeniable simpatico that made the one-off gig, a full-time band that has toured across much of North America.
2015’s self-released debut EP Girl of Infinity landed at #34 on the National College Radio charts, and as the result the buzz surrounding them, they landed a gig at that year’s Todos Santos Festival organized by R.E.M.’s Peter Buck. After a busy touring schedule, the members of the Vancouver-based indie rock band tucked themselves away to write their Jason Corbett-produced full-length debut, which is slated for release this year. Interestingly, the band’s Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees meets Stevie Nicks/Fleetwood Mac, Fantasm-era Starlight Girls-like album single “Dream Reader” is centered around a propulsive and angular bass line, shimmering guitar lines, four-on-the-floor-like drumming, atmospheric synths and ethereal harmonies that give the song a spectral yet dance floor friendly feel; but as the band’s Francesca Carbonneau told me in an email, the song comes from a very sobering and uncertain place. “‘Dream Reader’ was written around a series of dreams I had had while the band was feeling directionless,” Carbonneau says. “I was struggling to maintain my belief in the importance of creating music and our ambitions as a group. These dreams of drowning, stranded horses, and flying janky planes kept coming. I looked a few up in a dream dictionary and found that many of them were about new beginnings, emotional rebirth. After writing this song and finishing it off with the band, I began to feel inspired again. Whenever we create new music together, it seems to light me up.”
Directed by Jeremey Wallace-MacLean and starring Britt Irvin as a zebra and Chris Boni as a gorilla, the recently released video for “Dream Reader” possesses a dream-like logic, full of surreal yet vividly symbolic visuals. As the band’s Carbonneau explains, the video is “set in the subconscious mind of a girl lost in her pursuit for revenge.” She continues by saying that “the video represents the will to detach from oneself — though you cannot escape the person you will ultimately become.”
