Best Coast unveils video for new song ‘California Nights’

The members of Los Angeles band Best Coast love California so much they embedded that devotion into the group’s moniker. The team of Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno has expressed that spirit through catchy, aggressive ditties such as “Favorite Place” (with the line “why would anyone live anywhere else?”) and breakout song “Boyfriend.” The band just released its latest love letter, called “California Nights,” and this one is an ode to the glory of evenings beneath palm trees and stars.

The song is taken from the group’s forthcoming third album, also called “California Nights.” It’s Best Coast’s third full-length studio effort and first for the Capitol Records-distributed Harvest imprint. The initial release from the album -- the track’s a big, beefy work with grand production, sheets of Bruno and Cosentino guitars and sparse lyrics about Southern California, devotion, bliss, life and getting really, really high.

“I stay high all the time, just to get by,” sings Cosentino to open while simmering guitar floats beneath. It’s a gorgeous introduction, soon boosted with a boom of bass and drum. At over five minutes, it’s the band’s most epic track to date, one that patiently and with great grace explores the melody and the emotion. If lyrically it’s a bit simple and telegraphed – “California nights make me feel so happy I could die,” for example – Cosentino’s delivery, and her sturdy, increasingly confident voice, inject them with drama and fury, especially when she moves to introspection in later verses.

The video is as ethereal and deep as the song, as if the images were fed through a O.G. Kush filter. Directed by Adam Harding (Warpaint, Lou Barlow), it revels in the region’s natural light, lovingly celebrates Costentino’s cat Snack with slow motion close-ups and, overall, moves with a kind of stoned fuzziness.

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