His name is Darren Rademaker, but when it comes to making music, he’s better known by the moniker he uses for his studio releases: The Tyde.
It’s been quite some time since we last saw an album by the Tyde – not since 2016’s Darren 4, in fact – but in Rademaker’s defense, there’d been a full decade since the Tyde album before that one (Three’s Co.), so the fact that we only had to wait eight years for this one actually finds him stepping things up a bit.
As we wait for the release of The Tyde’s fifth studio album, Season 5, which is currently scheduled to hit record store shelves on March 1 via the wonderfully-named Santa Cruz record label Spiritual Pajamas, we can keep warm by listening to the album’s second single, “Streetwise,” which is joined in release today by its video, which was created by Brighton, UK visual artist Frisco Arts Club.
"The song was influenced by two major characters: Sonny Crockett cruising the streets of Little Havana, a bad ass with a cigarette, and the other a 1970s' PSA of a young Abraham Lincoln not going to College (like me). IYKYK," Rademaker said in the press release accompanying the announcement of the song and video release. "I wanted the bass guitar to sound like Fernando Saunders on Lou Reed's 'Legendary Hearts,' which co-producer Dan Horne totally got right. He also enlisted his bandmate from Circles Around The Sun, keyboard wizard Adam MacDougall, to lay down a part on the Hohner Clavinet that drives the chorus home."
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The process of putting together the video began with a discussion between Rademaker and Frisco Arts Club, one during which the lyrics were read and the story behind the song was revealed.
"The loose brief of 80s' Miami Vice aesthetics immediately gave me a luminescent color pallet to play with including brilliant cyans, electric pinks, bright yellows, and vibrant greens," said Frisco Arts Club in the aforementioned press release. "It’s free flowing, but I was keen to exaggerate specific words and play on distinctive rhythms to tell the story of the song visually. The idea was to create an elemental cut and paste collage-style animation by merging lifestyle images with my digital art with a focus on free flowing forms and geometric shapes. The result is reminiscent of a playful and rather good-humoured retro scrapbook."
The record features such players as Dan Horne, Colby Buddelmeyer, Matt Correia (Allah-Las), Clay Finch (Mapache), Albert Hickman, Derek James (The Entrance Band), Alex Knost (Tomorrow’s Tulips), and Adam MacDougall (Circles Around the Sun). As noted, the release is just around the corner - March 1 - but you can preorder the album by clicking right here.
