Written by Izel Villarba, find more of his work here.
I met Nico Brunstein and Nando Dale one happenstance night on a Brooklyn football pitch (“soccer field” in layman’s terms), during a moment in the collective American psyche that feels like ages ago. Back then everyone stood several arm lengths from each other, sanitized their hands every ten minutes, and prayed that an odd cough wasn’t the start of worse things to come. In the horrendous New York Winter, we played in masks knowing we were risking our lives. We just love soccer THAT much. I don’t mean to trivialize the situation. It was a serious time for the world and it felt illegal (it sorta was) to even consider playing team sports, let alone with strangers. The CDC should’ve arrested Steele FC for organizing it.
Yet if it weren’t for playing this pickup game, I never would’ve met Nando and Nico, who’re not just excellent soccer players, but excellent musicians as well. You might’ve seen them playing in Been Stellar, but the duo concurrently combine their talents in Club Soccer, a project that blends their love for R & B, dream pop, and bossa nova.
Today, Club Soccer premieres their video for “Wishing We Could Be in Love”, the first in a series of 2021 singles. It’s a humorous, absurd story that tells the daydreams of a couple separated by lockdown. On the surface, it finds Nando falling in love with a Roomba, but in a more meaningful way touches on escapism in times of uncertainty — the methods we use to distract us from the sadness. Most of us use technology to escape, some of us play soccer.
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