Remain Turns Denton's Empty Streets Into a Portrait

Every Denton band eventually has to answer the question of how to love a place without turning it into a postcard. Remain — the two-piece of singer-guitarist Caleb Coonrod and drummer Perry Hill — answered it this spring by refusing to show you the Courthouse.

Their music video for "The Last Light," out since April, is a slow drift through a Denton scrubbed of people: neighborhood streets after midnight, the UNT parking garage, the water at North and South Lakes parks. No square, no mural, no obvious landmark. Coonrod called it "tipping a hat to the city," but on his own terms. "I wanted it to be something that was universal," he told KXT, and you can feel that logic in the framing — these could be anyone's empty streets, which is exactly why they read as everyone's.

The clip was shot by Ryan McAdams and Brianna Flores of the Dallas production company Slate It, and it earns its restraint. A two-piece has nowhere to hide; a video for a two-piece has even less. So Remain leans into absence — the restlessness at the song's core, which Coonrod has said was drawn in part from watching family members struggle with addiction, gets a visual language of vacancy rather than melodrama.

That emotional weather is hard-won. Coonrod moved to town in 2012 and started the way half of Denton starts, playing open mics alone. He met Hill in 2014, and the pair put out a first EP in 2015 and a debut album in 2021 — a slow, deliberate discography for a band that has never seemed in a hurry to be anything other than a Denton band.

Which is the quietly radical thing about "The Last Light." In a summer when the college-town calendar thins out and it's tempting to write Denton off as a place bands leave from, Remain made the case that it's a place worth turning the camera back toward — even, especially, when it's empty. The band says it's working toward funding its next album, with more music promised soon.

If you want to understand the Denton scene's self-image — proud, unshowy, allergic to boosterism — start here. It's a love letter that never once says the words. And in a town this stubborn about authenticity, that reticence is the highest compliment a local can pay.

Catch up with the video now; then keep an eye out, because a band that took six years between its EP and its album tends to make the wait mean something.

Sources: Local band Remain drops new music video (KERA News); Watch: Remain trades Denton landmarks for empty streets (KXT 91.7)