Naarm (Melbourne) artist Robert Baxter unveiled “supernova” from their upcoming EP you wouldn’t expect cupid to cry (April 5th). “supernova” maintains Robert’s confessional lyrical style and features poignant piano melodies from Robert’s high school music teacher, Ryan Black, whom they acknowledge as one of the inspirations behind their songwriting journey.
As “supernova” dives into the complexities of freely giving love and the resulting emotional turmoil, it also reflects on the blurred lines of close friendships that occasionally cross into deeper territory. With its minimalist yet powerful melodies, “supernova” gradually builds to a crescendo of emotion that mirrors the explosive nature of its celestial namesake.
Robert explains the song,
“’supernova’ is inspired by a best friend who I was repeating the same patterns with; we would get too close and then not want to ruin the friendship but be simultaneously ruining the friendship by wanting to be more.”
The video stars Lyndon Watts (Aarron Burr in the national theatre tour of Hamilton) and was directed by Robert with artist Joyce Liu. In the sci-fi Greek tragedy, Lyndon embodies the role of a human named ‘Psyche,’ while Robert plays ‘Cupid,’ a government-created android clone assigned to re-establish human connections. However, a malfunction causes Cupid to develop feelings for Psyche, leading to a struggle to accept a love that doesn’t cause pain.
On the video, Robert says,
“In the future, humans are struggling to feel strong emotions, so the government developed ARQangels, clones that are built to shoot arrow beams of light that make humans feel strong emotions e.g. falling in love. Each time an ARQangel shoots an arrow they lose a piece of their energy – their life ends when they shoot 100 arrows. This music video is a short film, it could’ve been a whole movie – I had to cut the story down. I met Lyndon (Watts) through ballroom and he was so kind to take time out of his schedule to act in this video with me.”
Editor’s note: song title and album are stylised in lowercase by the artist
