(Premiere) Alt-Country Outfit Gregory Childs & Heart Lung Release New Video For “Blood Ties”

Gregory Childs & Heart Lung, a dark alt-country band from Toronto has just released their debut music video “Blood Ties” and we’re very excited to be premiering it here on Dropout today! The band is fairly new, coming to life in late 2019 as an alt-country outfit focused on taking pop-country to a gnarlier place. I think their doing a great job of that, mixing elements of grunge and folk into their sound to create really cool and dark country vibes. I don’t know if it’s the song itself or the video shot on the railroads of The Junction, but something about it feels very Canadian. Self-described as “emotionally confused Willie Nelson”, Gregory Childs & Heart Lung have a really intriguing sound, one that I would have to loved the opportunity to see live before live music got shut down. Until then, the band has given us this great new video to help tie us over until it returns.

Since writing the Baby Blue EP, a collection of songs that reminisce on classic heart bleed spun up with outlaw country and Cobain grease, Gregory Childs & Heart Lung have taken to the tracks of Toronto’s Junction triangle to record the single-shot video for “Blood Ties”. The rails are no stranger to Gregory Childs, who grew up next to a country rail crossing as a boy and walked the lines daily as a means of reflection. “Blood Ties” tells the story of a family estrangement and the traps that follow in its wake.

Click below to watch Gregory Childs & Heart Lungs go down one by one in their debut music video “Blood Ties”.

We recently had the opportunity to interview Gregory Childs and ask him about the new 2 song EP that Blood Ties is featured on, he told us

“”These songs came from a rough place. I was spending too much time drinking and wandering around by myself in the Junction and just Toronto in general. I spent a lot of time in the past. My day to day was a maelstrom for a while and the weekly meetups with Heart Lung became extremely important for me – the practices were my church and the songs hymns that brought meaning to what was otherwise a very bleak period. Heart Lung and I agreed that Baby Blue and Blood Ties bookended each other nicely and we focused on them for our debut release.”

When asked about the focus on taking pop-country to a gnarlier place, he said

“As a group we’re all drawn to raw storytelling. While we respect the pop elements of both classic and contemporary country we want our songs to feel like the mics just happened to be there, with the imperfections, throat pulls and chair squeaks included. We definitely aren’t perfect and we like it that way.”

To read the whole interview click here

And to listen to Baby Blue click below!