PREMIERE: Hachiku Shares Single “Keep On Swimming” and Dreamy Music Video

Today, Hachiku—the project of Australia-via-Germany-via-Detroit artist Anika Ostendorf—releases her gossamery alt-pop single “Keep On Swimming” and the Swan Lake-inspired music video, which was directed by Tom Mannion and Caity Moloney. The track is the third release off Hachiku’s sophomore record The Joys of Being Pure at Heart (due for release on February 28 via Marathon Artists). Ostendorf has worked at at Milk! Records in Naarm/Melbourne these last 7 years with Courtney Barnett, and her tender, emotionally honest songwriting will immediately resonate with Barnett fans.

“Keep On Swimming” is as light as a feather, with sparkling eddies of synth and gentle brushes of harp wending their way in and out of the track. Ostendorf’s voice is a crystalline marvel here as she explores her own sense of self and how that changes when you’re so very far away from home. She wrote the song reflecting on the time during the pandemic when she was “trying to make up my mind whether I’d be more successful swimming from Australia back to Germany or digging a tunnel through the earth.” Anyone who’s lived halfway across the globe from their loved ones can relate to this refreshing daydream of a track, which is as bittersweetly beautiful as memories of a distant home. Ostendorf explains: “There’s a certain self-inflicted heartache in the repeated goodbyes and the masochism of choosing to move to the other side of the world—always wondering and worrying, yet holding onto the belief that it was for good reason.” The confident grace of the track is whipped up into a whirlwind breakdown on the bridge, with glitching voices and smashing percussion swirling around in dancefloor-ready chaos. 

The music video, which was filmed in Berlin, shines with the same ethereal radiance as “Keep On Swimming.” Dressed in a white top fringed with feathers, Ostendorf sunbathes next to her swan compatriots by the German capital’s Neukölln canals and Schlachtensee. Every object is ringed with a fuzzy halo of light, just like how nostalgia makes whatever we miss seem just a bit brighter than reality. 

Watch the music video for “Keep On Swimming,” co-directed by Tom Mannion and Caity Moloney, below.