Photo by Ebru Yildiz

Today Downtown Boys have released their new album Public Luxury via Sub Pop. Along with the LP, they have also shared their latest single ‘Yellow Sun’.

‘Yellow Sun’ is a melodic and mellow produced track that is juxtaposed by the heavy lyrical content that touches on the war between Palestine and Israel. The musicality of the song provides a balance to the spoken word style delivery of Victoria Marie which adds some intensity to the track.

Downtown Boys have also unveiled an accompanying animated video along with the single, which you can stream below.

Regarding the single, Downtown Boys’ Joey La Neve DeFrancesco mentioned:

“‘Yellow Sun’ is a song for Lebanon, written as Israel’s ongoing invasion and occupation of the country began in 2024. The lyrics were inspired in part by the work of Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan, especially the poems “Beirut 1982” and “The Arab apocalypse,” which she wrote during Israel’s earlier occupation of Lebanon from 1982-2000. As with Ednan’s work, the song is meant to name the horrors (“phosphorous skies,” “every day an angel explodes”) while also insisting on the possibility of a new day: “The trees grow in every direction / I’m still heavy with love…

“The accompanying video by Lebanese animator Matar is a fable-like tribute to the decades of displacement and hostility faced by the indigenous shepherds and rural communities of Palestine and Lebanon since 1948. It also contains visual references to Adnan’s paintings