Review by Clea-marie Thorne
Nostalgia has a habit of showing us the bits we want to remember and quietly hiding what came after.
KALATONE’s ‘Nostalgia’ sits right in that uncomfortable space, pulling at memory, fear and the things that refuse to stay where we left them. Taken from the Gold Coast alternative hard rock band’s 2025 debut EP Pathways, the song now gets its own official video, turning those ideas into a family story that moves backwards through time.
That reverse structure is the thing grabbing me first. The video opens on an empty, tree-lined suburban street and tidy lawns. For the first few seconds the frame moves through false-colour washes, shifting from magenta to red and then tobacco tones before settling into subdued true colour. The effect touches the whole frame, including the sky, but is most noticeable across the grass and tree canopy.
It feels like the first little fracture between memory and the present.
A man stands at the front entry of his home, head bowed. A ball flies away from the doorway, the reverse movement making it clear events are already being pulled back towards where they began.
A close-up catches his anguish before his wedding-ringed hand grips at the lawn as he kneels outside. Nearby, a traffic sign shows a bend with another road branching away from it. Whether deliberate symbolism or not, it is hard not to read something into it when the story is already heading backwards through the breakdown of a marriage.
The band arrive in fragments too. Adrian Russo’s fingers on his bass fretboard. Tim Pitchford’s hand around a microphone. Dave Kemp’s forearm working the kit while Gavin Storky shoulders into his six-string. Then Pitchford appears, with glimpses of the others around him inside what looks like a room lined with grey drop sheets. A swinging light catches the folds behind them.
Memory rarely arrives in tidy order anyway. It comes in pieces, sometimes sharp, sometimes softened by time and often carrying the weight of what happened next. That sits neatly against lyrics dealing in broken fragments, fear, darkness and memory slipping through every crack. There is little warmth around the band either. Skin tones and natural timber give us traces of colour, but nothing becomes particularly vibrant.
Inside the home, Vincent B. Gorce and Janelle Bailey-Moore take the lead roles as husband and wife, with Lara Gerhard as their daughter. Their family scenes do not rely on huge dramatic gestures to sell the breakdown. An early flash shows an argument and a piece of paper being waved between them. Whether it is a divorce document or something else is never made explicit, and it does not need to be. Later come rejected touches, bodies turned away from one another in bed, and their daughter retreating into her room while still watching what is happening around her.
At one point she tears her own image away from a photograph of the three of them. That image lingers.
The parents have other difficult exchanges, with the wife repeatedly shutting him out. We already know this family has come apart, and the visuals cement that even as the video begins putting it back together. The lyrics themselves are internal, moving through demons, angels, fear, memory, sanctuary and fractured thought. The video takes all of that inward mess and gives it a human story without spelling out one fixed meaning.
There is something particularly sad about knowing where a story ends while watching the pieces slowly return to where they began. A rejected hug means something different when you know affection once sat in its place. A ripped photograph becoming whole again does not erase what we have already seen happen to the people inside it.
Musically, ‘Nostalgia’ slows things down and gives Pitchford room to play with tone and emotional character in his vocal. There are moments where I can hear A Perfect Circle and Audioslave in the vocal phrasing and the way the song is put together. Those are just my ears talking, though. KALATONE are not wearing either band like a costume. There are little flashes of nostalgia in its blood, pardon the pun, but ‘Nostalgia’ has grown into its own beast.
The heavier sections have somewhere to come from because the song is not charging at full weight from the outset. The chorus tightens the song’s idea, Pitchford hanging on to nostalgia while admitting it is breaking down his sanctuary. Pitchford and the husband are repeatedly overlaid in the frame, visually tying the expressive vocal to what the man is carrying. ‘Nostalgia’ is not being treated as comfort. It is something he is clinging to even while knowing it is doing damage.
Then comes the yearning. Mirrors keep appearing too, reflecting the present while holding onto versions of what once was. In one memory flash, the lyric ‘Fear aside I’m petrified. The Vision stole my voice.’ falls over the daughter watching her parents argue, making the words feel briefly tied to her experience as much as his.
‘I long to be taken… taken back to where it all began’ is the clearest expression of that pull backwards, arriving as the video carries us towards earlier, happier memories. Flashes of the present still interrupt them, but colour and vibrancy begin creeping into the scenes as the family moves further back in time.
Director Peter Koevari does not turn every lyric into a literal scene. The family story remains one reading of it rather than the answer.
Co-director and director of photography Nigel Jones keeps the visual world subdued for much of the clip. Outside the home, through the earlier family scenes and during the band’s performance, the colour grade is drained of much of its warmth. Against lyrics full of broken fragments, fear and memory, the band’s drab performance space feels almost like a physical version of that headspace, cold, bare and lit by a swinging light creating shadows that never let the tension settle.
As warmer tones begin to creep into the frame with the happier memories unfolding, the characters themselves feel noticeably more alive.
Koevari’s decision to tell the story backwards also changes where the hurt comes from. We are not waiting for happiness to collapse. We already know something has gone wrong, so the further backwards we travel, the more each happier moment carries what we know is coming.
The daughter tearing herself from the family photograph is one of the strongest examples. Seeing that family gradually return to a time before the rupture does not undo the image of her removing herself from it. That is where the clip earns the song rather than simply sitting beside it.
There is another little full-circle element here too. ‘Nostalgia’ is one of the songs that helped KALATONE work out what the band could become. Pitchford was given the instrumental while the group was still looking for the right vocalist. The lyrics and vocal melodies he brought back became this track.
Now one of their earliest songs about being pulled backwards is itself being revisited.
The final moments return us to the man outside the home where we first found him, carrying acceptance, regret and longing all at once.
‘Nostalgia’ is already about being pulled backwards, even while knowing that hanging on is breaking something in the present. The video makes that struggle visible.
And when it leaves him back outside that house, there is still the feeling that some memories never really loosen their grip.
