Exclusive Video Premiere: ‘The Road You Didn’t Take,’ Stornoway

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth;” begins Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”  Inspired by Frost’s words, Oxford-based band Stornoway wrote the similarly titled song “The Road You Didn’t Take,” which is included on their forthcoming album Bonxie, and an abstract, sun-infused video, which we are pleased to premiere for the first time in the U.S. below.

“The initial idea for this video was to allow space for someone to create a filmed ‘response’ to the track and have some creative autonomy,” keyboardist Jon Ouin and singer, lyricist, and guitarist Brian Briggs say. “As the band wasn’t actually in the same city at the time, it made sense for us to not feature in the film, which in turn allowed for a slightly less conventional music video.”

“The Road You Didn’t Take” is Stornoway’s most ambitious music video to date. Directed by Ben Jonston, the camera chases after the sun as it sets over White Horse Hill in Uffington, U.K. and then accepts the darkness, depicting the empty nighttime streets between London and Oxford. Overexposed vignettes, dual exposure superimpositions, and abstracted landscapes visually entertain, as Briggs sings “On the road you didn’t take / Get high up on the mountain / Feel your lungs start burning as you ride” atop cinematic compositions.

“Although the introduction in the music is quite hushed and warm, there is definitely a pace to the guitar picking and we think Ben responded to that really well,” Ouin and Briggs continue. “[He allowed] the visuals to augment the sense of rolling momentum and journey, which was already present in the song.”

STORNOWAY’S BONXIE WILL BE RELEASED IN THE U.S. ON FRIDAY, JULY 31. VISIT THE BAND’S WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATIOIN.