Since the release of their full-length debut, the members of July Talk have developed a reputation for explosive live shows in which they have grown their national and international profile as the band has toured across Canada, the US, Europe and Australia with festival stops at Toronto’s WayHome Music and Arts Festival, Atlanta’s Shaky Knees Music Festival, New Orleans’ Voodoo Music and Arts Experience, Montreal’s Osheaga Festival, the UK’s Isle of Wight Festival and Austin’s Austin City Limits Music Festival. And building upon the band’s growing profile, their sophomore effort Touch was released earlier this year with the album’s first single “Push + Pull” holding the number 1 spot on the Canadian Alternative Radio charts for more than 8 weeks.

The band is currently on tour to support Touch and it includes a December 15 stop at the Bowery Ballroom; but in the meantime, the band’s latest single “Picturing Love” will further the quintet’s reputation for their unique sound in which Dreimanis’ gruff, whiskey and cigarette-tinged growl and Fay’s coquettish and ethereal vocals are paired with bombastic, anthemic hooks, twinkling keys, angular yet propulsive power chord-based guitar and bass chords and thundering, arena rock-like drumming in what is arguably one of the sultriest songs I’ve heard this year. Lyrically, the song focuses on the art and act of seduction in the modern age.

The recently released music video was filmed and shot in a gorgeously cinematic black and white and much like the song is a post-modern take on love in the modern age, as it features the central couple viewing each other through several layers of screens — and it suggest that the video’s central couple, the band’s vocalists are almost always at a sense of remove from one another, yet desperately wanting each other’s touch. But on another sense, it also evokes the game and roles people play when it comes to lust and love.