A Darker Bright is a four-piece rock band based out of Los Angeles, CA with members Geoff Prather (lead vocals and guitar), Bryan Smith (bass and backup vocals), Jason Jimenez (lead guitar and backup vocals) and Patrick Rideaux (drums and backup vocals). Here's a pic so you can see our faces!

We're a dreamy alternative rock and roll band that aims to speak to your mind and soothe your heart with sonic goodness. We combine elements of post rock bands like Explosions In the Sky and This Will Destroy You with alternative rock like Smashing Pumpkins and indie rock like Interpol. We want our music to stir your emotions while having a great time doing it!

Bygones is a 6/8 waltz with a retro vibe that delves into the themes of longing, regret and acceptance. Geoff wrote the song as an exploration of his own struggles with OCD and trauma that had him constantly looking backward at his life and wishing things had been different. Obviously, that is no way to live! Geoff is doing much better now and this song served as a dose of catharsis that the band can't wait to share with the world. We all know that the only true way forward through anything difficult in life is acceptance, but oftentimes it is the hardest thing to achieve.

But don't just read some words on a screen, give the song as listen!

Bygones Private Link

With the vision the amazing Sforza production team, we aim to create a beautiful piece of art that enhances the messages found in the song and takes your mind, body and soul to a different world.

Sforza.tv believes music videos should be taken seriously: with projects for Atlantic Records, 4AD, and Warner Music, Sforza is on a mission to create inspiringly disruptive content and celebrate individuality in video production.

Our concept echoes the lyrics and the beautiful clash of nostalgia and exhaustion, desire to let go and to solve, by mixing the unmixable: raw, expressive imagery of the 90s rock scene (think The Cranberries, Deerhunter, PJ Harvey) and sentimental, naively expressive visuals of the 20s. Radiohead meets Buster Keaton, Nirvana meets the traveling circus. At the heart of it - a simple metaphor that we slowly unveil by the end of it all.

We open in a dark arena with a circle of light in the center. In the light, we see a tall construction of stacked chairs, musical instruments, photo frames, antique relics, etc. It feels like someone’s entire life was used to build this feeble mountain. On top of this construction, Geoff is sitting on a chair with a guitar, miraculously calm and seemingly indifferent to how frail this pyramid is. The band is placed right below this monstrosity, waiting. Two circus assistants are standing nearby - a moment later, they both grin and raise their arms to signal the start of the show. The track begins.

As the band performs the track, the assistants start pulling objects from the pile, one by one. The whole construction starts to gradually get thinner, flimsier. Geoff keeps performing nonetheless.The assistants demonstrate a trick - a white pigeon disappearing from the cage. In the meantime, the performance shots of Geoff and the band are intercut with faces and characters that appear on stage: aging actors in wrinkled Shakespearean costumes, clowns grimly sharing a cigarette, a dancer practicing Irish step. It all feels like the inside of someone’s head, messy memory of years and years lived, turned into a colorful cacophony.

Time for the main trick - the assistants approach the pile with Geoff still on top of it. A hand reaches out for a chair at the very bottom - one move, and the entire pile comes crashing down in slow motion. Chairs, photo frames, manuscripts, Geoff’s guitar - everything comes smashing on the floor - except for Geoff. Instead of him, we see a white pigeon flying up to the ceiling, the same one that disappeared from the cage minutes before. The show assistants bow, surrounded by scattered objects and musical instruments - the band is gone. Bygones are Bygones.

Our goals with this project are really two-fold. First, we want to create a work of art that reinforces the themes of the song and takes the viewer on a journey. Music videos have the power to elevate a song and transform the experience of listening to it into something greater than just the music alone. Through the imagery mentioned above, we want to make an emotional impact. Maybe it gives you a chance to reflect on a difficult time in your own life. Perhaps it's the push you need to have a difficult conversation with a friend or relative. Or maybe you just get inspired to make some art of your own!

Second, as a band whose members have created dozens of songs over the years, we want to have a calling card that can hopefully get attention from the right people to push our careers forward. Let's face it, making a splash with music in this day and age is probably harder than ever before. Statistics show that 120,000 new songs are released EACH DAY. That's an incredible amount of music and the vast majority of that will never reach you because it will be impossible to find amidst the other releases and labels and studios pushing their artists through advertising, marketing and promotion that no independent artist has to spend.

But a compelling music video with incredible visuals to accompany an amazing song could help us cut through the deluge of content and give our band a chance to be heard by a larger audience. That's our hope anyway!

And that's where you come in! With your help we can achieve the amazing surrealist story dreamed up by our director. We can submit it to music and film festivals to get eyeballs and ears on our music. We can build our own promotions around a video that we know will entice people to watch. We truly believe that a video like this could be the difference between us releasing another song into the void, and having it move the needle for our success.

Thanks for taking the time to read about the project. Check out our incentives (there are some really good ones!) and see which one would be right for you. And even if you don't pledge monetarily, it would mean the world to us if you could share this page with your friends and family, on social media, shout it from the rooftops and any other creative ways you can think of to let people know about what we're doing. Take care!