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of Montreal’s “Already Dreaming” Feels Like an Intimate Afterword
of Montreal's "Already Dreaming," a '60s-tinged single from Kevin Barnes, arrives as a quieter, intimate counterpoint to last month's "When." Directed by Barnes's daughter Beatrice, the video stages yearning and isolation in a dilapidated house, signaling a domestic, reflective turn.
Last month Kevin Barnes broke the cycle with “When,” a brash, propulsive single that leaned into sexual swagger and studio gloss. The followup, “Already Dreaming,” takes the record in a different direction: quieter, tinted by 1960s pop tropes and a kind of domestic melancholy that sits oddly comfortable against Barnes’s history of theatricality.
The song arrives with a music video directed by Barnes’s daughter, Beatrice, and the familial aspect matters. This is not a gimmick; it reframes the song as an exchange between generations and sensibilities. Barnes has been an extreme shapeshifter across of Montreal’s catalog, moving from warped glam and psychedelic camp to gleaming synth pop and back again. “Already Dreaming” is one of those moments where restraint feels like the most radical choice.
“I wrote this song while still living in Vermont,” Barnes explains. “I can see now that it was a sad augury for the end of my 8 year relationship and the close of that important chapter of my life. As sad as the song is, it does point to new beginnings and the blind hopefulness inherent in ripping it up and starting again. Working with Beatrice on the music video was a dream. I loved watching her do her directorial thing. One of the main reasons I moved to NYC was to be closer to her and it felt really special to be able to collaborate on an art project together.”
Beatrice’s approach leans into cinematic touchstones rather than music-video shorthand. Her brief for the piece, she says, was rooted in ’60s film language and surrealist media. The result is plain in the video’s mise-en-scene: a dilapidated house with interiors that are both familiar and slightly off, figures inhabiting the same frame who feel emotionally stranded from one another, and a series of tableaux where yearning is staged as repetition. One character reaches, the other recoils. Close-ups hold a beat longer than they should, the camera breathing with the actors instead of cutting away.
“My vision for this music video was inspired by ’60s films and surrealist media. Listening to the song, I immediately saw a surrealist dream-like treatment centered around yearning and isolation in someone else’s presence. Stuck in a dilapidated house, an unhappy couple lives in conflict. One desperately fighting for the other’s attention while the other repels every effort.”
That visual austerity matches the song’s mood. Where much of Barnes’s recent work has relied on ornate production and a kind of maximalist confession, “Already Dreaming” allows space. The melody settles into an ache rather than an exclamation. Lyrically, it reads like an entry in a private ledger: retrospective, tender, slightly mortified. Hearing it after “When” makes the two tracks feel like companion pieces rather than contradictory statements. One is performative bravado, the other a private folding up of things that no longer fit.
Context matters here. Aethermead, due June 5 via Polyvinyl, arrives with Barnes in a different place personally and geographically. He has relocated to New York in part to be closer to family, and that relocation seems to be refracting itself through the music. The decision to hand over directorial control to his daughter is a small but telling move in a career that has often foregrounded Kevin as auteur. This collaboration softens that center without surrendering artistic intent; it makes the work feel like the output of a household rather than a single personality.
There is an old trick in pop where the quieter song reveals more about an artist than the hits. For Barnes, who has made an art of reinvention, “Already Dreaming” reads like an honest coda. It is not dramatic in the way of of Montreal’s stage persona, but it is quietly consequential. The video compounds that intimacy by staging heartbreak as lived-in space, a home in which two people have become strangers. It’s an ordinary kind of sadness, framed with a careful cinematic eye, and it suggests that Barnes’s next chapter might be less about spectacle and more about the small, precise moments that follow the end of something important.
aethermead is out 6/5 via Polyvinyl.
