Warpaint’s new two-part performance for Yours Truly is best understood as a matched set. In one film the Los Angeles quartet plays “Undertow”, the clearest melodic invitation on its debut album, The Fool. In the other it takes on “Bees”, the more rhythmically unsettled song that follows it. Contemporary reports from Pitchfork, Radio Milwaukee and Nialler9 identify both clips as performances made for the site. Seen together, they amount to a compact study of how Warpaint turns four distinct parts into one moving shape.
The films also arrive at exactly the right point in the band’s story. The Fool had been released in the United Kingdom on October 25 and in the United States on October 26, according to the Los Angeles Times and the release record at MusicBrainz. Rough Trade’s own listing calls it Warpaint’s debut full-length after 2009’s Exquisite Corpse EP. “Undertow” and “Bees” are tracks three and four, running 5:53 and 4:25 on the album. Within little more than a week of the record’s arrival, the Yours Truly performances provide something a track list cannot: a view of the ensemble’s internal traffic.
The credits name Nate Chan as director and Will Abramson as producer, details preserved with the films on Warpaint’s official artist channel in the “Undertow” upload and “Bees” upload. Chan does not impose a plot or a visual metaphor. His close-range approach keeps returning attention to hands, faces and the exchange of cues. That restraint suits a group whose drama comes less from a single front person than from the way a bass figure, guitar accent, drum pattern and vocal phrase continually revise one another.
Two album tracks, one live argument
Warpaint’s 2010 lineup was Emily Kokal on vocals and guitar, Theresa Wayman on vocals and guitar, Jenny Lee Lindberg on bass and vocals, and Stella Mozgawa on drums and keyboards, as a contemporaneous Guardian profile documented. Those roles sound conventional when listed, but the session shows why the band did not. Lindberg’s bass is not merely a low foundation; it carries motifs and points the songs forward. Mozgawa’s drumming creates pockets of open space as decisively as it marks the beat. Kokal and Wayman divide the guitar register rather than collapsing into an undifferentiated wash, and the voices can move from lead to reinforcement without changing the band’s center of gravity.
That shared grammar matters because the two songs were finished differently on record. MusicBrainz’s track-level credits list Tom Biller and Warpaint as producers of both, but Andrew Weatherall as the mixer of “Undertow” and Adam Samuels as the mixer of “Bees.” The studio versions therefore bear different final hands. The Yours Truly set strips that distinction back to the quartet itself. It does not make the songs identical; it reveals the same habits beneath them—patience, counterpoint and a refusal to let accompaniment become passive.
The performances are also full-length readings, not abbreviated promotional fragments. That decision is essential. Warpaint’s songs accumulate meaning through recurrence: a phrase comes back with a different weight because the rhythm section has tightened, a harmony has entered, or a guitar has shifted from punctuation to sustained color. Cutting either song down to a chorus would erase the very process these films are good at showing.
“Undertow” locates the hook inside the ensemble
“Undertow” is the more immediately legible of the two songs, but the performance does not treat accessibility as simplicity. Kokal’s lead line gives the listener a clear melodic path, with Wayman helping widen key vocal phrases, yet the momentum never belongs to the vocal alone. Lindberg’s bass supplies gravitational pull; Mozgawa stays measured rather than forcing an early climax; the two guitars maintain separate contours. The arrangement works because no part tries to explain everything at once.
That separation is what makes the build persuasive. A lesser live arrangement might signal intensity by getting uniformly louder. Warpaint changes density instead. Guitar notes ring for longer, the bass feels more insistent, the drums close some of the gaps they previously left open, and the shared voice around the refrain makes the melody feel larger without turning it blunt. The song’s title suggests being dragged by a force below the surface, and the quartet achieves that sensation through repetition whose pressure changes almost imperceptibly.
Pitchfork’s contemporary review heard Kokal and Wayman together on the title line and argued that the album did not completely capture the band’s live chemistry. The Yours Truly take helps explain both observations. The vocal blend is important, but it is one strand among four. The camera can move from singer to bassist or drummer without leaving the song’s main action, because the action is coordination itself.
The result also clarifies why “Undertow” works as the album’s point of entry. It has a memorable refrain and an orderly arc, but neither is laid over a generic backing. The hook grows out of the same close listening that produces Warpaint’s more elusive passages. The Fader’s report called it a live take captured by Yours Truly’s cameras and connected its expansive effect to the band’s earlier performance in a cramped Williamsburg room. The room in this film is not something Warpaint has to overcome; the players use its intimacy to make every small adjustment count.
“Bees” makes rhythm the lead voice
“Bees” begins from a less stable proposition. Rather than pulling toward one obvious refrain, it keeps redistributing emphasis. Mozgawa’s clipped syncopation opens and closes spaces in the measure. Lindberg moves through them with a circling bass line, while the guitars answer in short, angled figures instead of supplying a continuous bed. The vocal initially behaves like another recurring texture; when the voices broaden, the release lands because the instrumental parts have spent so long preserving their independence.
The title offers a useful image without needing to become a literal interpretation. The individual lines resemble separate flight paths: busy, purposeful and liable to look chaotic when isolated. Their coherence appears at the level of the whole. Chan’s camera makes this easier to follow than the record alone. A cut to the drummer can reveal why a guitar phrase feels suspended; a return to the bass can show what has kept the section moving while the upper parts flicker around it.
At 4:25 on The Fool, “Bees” is shorter than “Undertow,” but it is not the lighter piece. Its compression creates a different kind of tension. Where “Undertow” demonstrates how the quartet can deepen a direct song without obscuring it, “Bees” demonstrates how it can hold a complicated pattern together without sanding off its edges. Pitchfork’s video notice singled out the “Bees” performance and pointed listeners back to “Undertow”; Radio Milwaukee and Nialler9 explicitly presented the two films as companions. That pairing is more illuminating than either clip on its own.
The contrast also guards against a familiar mistake in describing Warpaint: treating atmosphere as though it were a layer of fog added after the songwriting. In “Bees,” atmosphere is a consequence of exact rhythmic choices. The unsettled feeling comes from where notes land, how long they are allowed to decay, and which player leaves room for another. Nothing needs to be vague for the total effect to feel mysterious.
A writing method becomes visible
A pre-release Interview Magazine conversation supplies useful context, with one necessary qualification. Kokal said Warpaint often wrote by jamming together, allowing melody to suggest syllables before lyrics were fixed; she also named “Baby” and “Shadows” as songs whose vocal parts had been written before they were brought to the group. She did not claim that “Undertow” and “Bees” followed one identical recipe. What the interview establishes is a broader priority: emotional and melodic information can emerge through collective playing rather than being handed down as a completed singer-songwriter skeleton.
The same interview described a similarly adaptive recording process. Mozgawa said most of the album was tracked with Biller in a long room inside a former women’s fitness center; Kokal said some vocals were later recorded at a friend’s house after that studio became unavailable. Those circumstances help explain why the record can feel assembled from several acoustic environments. The Yours Truly films offer the inverse experiment: put the four musicians in one visible space and let the songs prove that their identity survives outside the studio construction.
This is where the filmmaking earns its keep. Chan’s restraint is not merely tasteful; it is analytical. By declining a narrative concept and staying close to the performance, the films show where the arrangements breathe. They let a viewer notice that a held guitar note can be as consequential as a new riff, that Lindberg can guide a transition without stepping forward, and that Mozgawa can change the apparent size of the room by changing the weight of the beat. The images do not solve Warpaint’s music. They make its decisions legible.
Why the two films belong together
Contemporary criticism repeatedly treated Warpaint’s live interplay as central to the group’s appeal. Pitchfork described the members as seeming to discover songs in real time, while a Chromewaves review—written after the author had seen the band four times that year—emphasized the push between spontaneous jamming and meticulous design. The Yours Truly set contains both impressions. The players look free to react, yet the structures never drift out of focus.
“Undertow” supplies the invitation: melody, gradual escalation and a refrain that arrives with greater force each time. “Bees” supplies the proof of range: asymmetrical accents, independent lines and a resolution that depends on the listener following the pattern rather than waiting for a conventional payoff. Together, the performances expose the practical craft beneath The Fool’s nocturnal surface. Warpaint’s atmosphere is not decoration placed over the songs. It is what four musicians create when each one treats space, timing and the others’ choices as part of her own instrument.