Emotional Response Records‘ Typical Girls compilation series derives its title from the legendary British all-female punk/post-punk outfit The Slits, who gleefully proclaimed “Who invented the ‘Typical Girl'” as they attacked gender and sexual stereotypes back in 1979. Obvious, if you’ve lived long enough and have gotten to know real, human women, you’d discover that the “typical girl” is a bunch of bullshit.
Inspired by the bold and pioneering women of punks and post-punk’s fist wave, the Typical Girls compilation series has proudly highlighted remarkable women making remarkable music. Volume 6 of the series features the finest female-led acts in contemporary punk, indie rock and darkwave from all over the planet. Volume 6 features tracks from:
Typical Girls Volume 6‘s latest single “Landscape Shift,” is by Memphis-based duo Optic Sink, an which features Nots‘ Natalie Hoffmann and Ben Bauermeister that specializes in a genre-defying sound that morphs from cold wave to psychedelia to distorted noise rock, often within the same song. Thematically and sonically, the duo fragment and reassemble sounds, concepts and verbal constructs while attempting to find beauty in the journey despite what the final resolution may be.
“Landscape Shift” is a bracingly icy, minimalist track centered around skittering Casio synth-like beats, Hoffman’s deadpan delivery and woozy and pitchy synth oscillations. Sonically, the song evokes, the sense of having the rug yanked out from under you — and being in a brutal and mad, mad, mad world that makes no sense.
Asheville-based post-punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Secret Shame can trace their origins back to summer 2016 when Matthew (bass) and Lena (vocals) met through mutual friends. As a duo, the band released their self-titled debut EP, but they mostly stuck to hometown DIY shows.
Nathan, who had released the band’s debut EP, later joined on drums and not long after, Aster joined on guitar. The Asheville-based outfit’s full-length debut, 2019’s Dark Synthetics was released to widespread critical acclaim with album single “Calm” being featured on The New York Times‘ playlist, and the album landing on a number of that year’s Best-of-lists, including landing at #77 on Bandcamp Daily and #1 on Post-Punk.com.
Building upon that momentum, the band embarked on an East Coast tour, which kicked off at Hopscotch Festival. They also recorded a split 7″ single “Dissolve/Pure” with Aster as the band’s sole guitarist.
Throughout the band’s growing catalog, they’ve maintained a steadfast refusal to a single genre, but pull from a wide range of influences including post-punk, death rock, shoegaze and dream pop among others. But at the core of their sound is a palpable and uneasy tension between rage and melancholy, the beautiful and the bleak that finds some resolution in the way the music reflects the lyrics’ mood.
2022 has been a busy year for the Asheville-based JOVM mainstays: They headlined this year’s Dark Spring Boston and they’ve quickly become a regular presence at Hopscotch Music Festival. They’ve also spent much of the year touring extensively, opening for the likes of Xiu Xiu, Wednesday, Soft Kill, Choir Boy, and Vision Video.
Secret Shame’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Autonomy is slated for an October 28, 2022 release. Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with engineer/producer Alex Farrar, the album reportedly sees the JOVM mainstays reaching a new level of maturity both musically and lyrically: While the 11-song album may be diverse and yet cohesive, the album’s material is centered with lyrics that directly confront the realities of addiction, body dysmorphia, abuse and mental illness with an unvarnished honesty.
Late last month, I wrote about album single “Color Drain,” a single that found the JOVM mainstays taking up a dreamy, shoegazer-like take on post punk that brought Cocteau Twins to mind paired with enormous, catharsis-inducing choruses and Lena’s achingly plaintive vocals. Lyrically the song features some of the most painfully honest lyrics in the band’s growing catalog: “Color Drain” details Lena’s long battle with anorexia, and how it feels to walk through the world in an apathetic and dissociative state after realizing that they both wanted help and simultaneously didn’t want to accept that help.
Autonomy‘s latest single, “Zero” much like its immediate predecessor sees the band’s Lena detailing struggles with addiction, body dysmorphia, abuse and mental illness with the unfiltered and unvarnished honesty of someone, who has gone through hell and back multiple times over. Lena’s lyrics and expressive, Sinead O’Connor-like delivery are paired with an arrangement that turns from shimmering and brooding to full on raging storm for the song’s catharsis-inducing coda.
I’m certain that someone out there has gone through many, if not all, of the same things that Secret Shame’s frontperson has experienced. But what “Zero” will say to you is that you’re not alone, that someone out there has been through the same hell, that not only would they empathize and truly get your struggle, but that there is understanding, kindness and hope — even if its three or four minutes.
Directed by the band’s Lena Machina and Aster Nema, the accompanying video for “Zero” is captures the inner monologue-like feel of the song with a feverish and feral intensity.
If you’ve been frequenting this site over the past year or so, you might recall that the Finnish outfit had a collaborated with Welsh-born, Finnish-based singer/songwriter and musician Jenny Stevens, a.k.a. The Ukelele Girl over the course of a handful of singles including:
“Beneath Smooth Waters,” a slow-burning , Dummy era Portishead like song featuring glistening, reverb-drenched synth arpeggios and sinuous bass lines paired with Stevens’ plaintive vocals.
“Unfinished Conversations,” a track that saw the rest lessly experimental Finnish outfit pushing their sound in a new direction — towards the dance floor, while retaining their unerring knack for sharp hooks.
Their latest single “Who Knows Where The Time Goes” is a slow-burning A Storm in Heaven-meets-4AD Records like song centered around shimmering and swirling guitars, atmospheric synths and a propulsive rhythm section. Adding to the dreamy feel of the entire affair, Glasgow-based, Hungarian-British singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Robert Severin contributes his gentle and vulnerable crooned delivery. The end result is a wistful and aching meditation on time, aging and mortality that feels like a gentle lullaby.
Acclaimed London-based post-punk act and JOVM mainstays White Lies — Harry McVeigh (vocals, guitar), Charles Cave (bass, vocals) and Jack Lawrence-Brown (drums) — released their sixth album, the Ed Bueller and Claudius Mittendorfer co-produced As I Try Not To Fall Apart earlier this year.
Recorded over two breakneck studio sessions, As I Try Not To Fall Apart features what may arguably be White Lies’ most expansive material to date with the songs possessing elements of arena rock, electro pop, prog rock and funky grooves paired with their penchant for enormous, rousingly anthemic hooks.
If you’ve been frequenting this site over the course of this year, you might recall that I’ve written about four of As I Try Not To Fall Apart singles
“As I Try Not To Fall Apart,” a rousingly anthemic yet psychologically precise character study of a desperate man, who feels hopelessly stuck in a socially prescribed “appropriate” gender role, while also trying to express his own vulnerability and weakness.
“I Don’t Want To Go To Mars,” one of the most mosh pit friendly, guitar-driven rippers the band has released in some time that tells a story of its main character being sent off to a new colonized Mars to live out a sterile and mundane existence. The band goes on to say: “Fundamentally the song questions the speed at which we are developing the world(s) we inhabit, and what cost it takes on our wellbeing.”
“Am I Really Going To Die,” a glittery, glam rocker centered that seemed inspired by Roxy Music and Duran Duran, but thematically touches upon mortality and the uneasy acceptance of the inevitable
“Blue Drift,” an expansive prog rock-like song centered around the rousingly anthemic hooks that White Lies has long been known for, a relentless motorik groove, Nile Rodgers-like funk guitar, thunderous drumming and glistening synths paired with McVeigh’s yearning delivery. The song captures a narrator, who’s a gaping wound of heartache and despair, uncertain of their footing and on the verve of a breakdown.
Slated for an October 21, 2022 release through [PIAS], the bonus edition of As I Try Not To Fall Apart features four songs recorded during the AITNTFA sessions but were ultimately cut from the album.
“Trouble In America,” the first of the four bonus singles was centered around a John Taylor-like disco-friendly bass line, glistening and squiggling synths, thunderous drumming and a bombastic cock rock-meets-arena rock chorus paired with some incisive and politically charged lyrics about the current state in America that simultaneously seem indebted to American Psycho.
“We gave up on b-sides years ago, and went into making an album with the sole aim to fit the most cohesive 40mins of music onto two sides of a 12″ that we could,” White Lies explains. “Unfortunately, that means some music is sidelined at the final hurdle. ‘Trouble In America’ was the hardest song to leave off. It was written a couple of days after ‘Am I Really Going to Die’ and lives in the same world and energy. Desperation Funk? In this song we jump between the mind of a serial killer, and his good Christian teenage daughter as she realizes who…or what her father is and always has been. ‘My old man’s making trouble in America! Oh, lord, take the weight off me!’ she pleads over a cock-rock, Todd Rundgren-esque chorus. We have a history of bonus tracks becoming live favorites, and we’re putting a bitcoin on this horse to keep up tradition.”
The second of the four bonus tracks, “Breakdown Days” is dance floor friendly bop centered around arpeggiated piano and synth stabs, thunderous boom bap-like drumming paired with the JOVM mainstays’ unerring knack for enormous, arena rock-like hooks. But under the sleek arena pop meets house facade is a tense, uneasy song that evokes being trapped with yourself and with a significant other, and desperately trying to hold it together during the height of pandemic-related lockdowns.
“’Breakdown Days’ was written in the heart of the first UK lockdown. The song reflects my mood at the time, I felt trapped in many ways not being able to tour or to work,” White Lies’ Harry McVeigh explains. “The lyrics are about yearning to reach out about your problems but because you’re living together, in close quarters, it means you can’t totally lose your shit! I always enjoy dressing up quite dark lyrics in a pop song and I love the contrast in this track. I’m sure we all dress ourselves up sometimes!”
With the release of 2020’s self-released, full-length debut, the Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada-based art rock/post punk outfit Blessed — Drew Riekman, Reuben Houweling, Jake Holmes and Mitchell Trainor — received attention and praised for crafting a self-assured, fully formed sound and aesthetic informed by their reverence for their small, rural city, located in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley.
Last year’s iii EP saw the Abbotsford-based act further expanding upon their sound and approach: The EP’s material featured glitchy electronics, measured drum work and guitar work that frequently shifted from chiming and cheerful to serrated and snarling within a turn of a phrase, paired with Riekman’s expressive vocals.
The EP also continued the long-held ethos of collaboration and community that’s been at the center of their work. The self-produced EP was recorded at Vancouver-based Rain City Recorders with vocals tracked at friends’ houses across their hometown. They then recruited four different mixers for each EP’s song — Purity Ring’s Corin Roddick, Tortoise’s John McEntire, Holy Fuck‘s Graham Walsh and the band’s own Drew Riekman.
iii‘s material reflected Riekman’s own experiences and struggles with anxiety, which at its worse confined him to his home for months at a time. “I really struggled with agoraphobia when I was younger, and still do to this day,” Riekman said in press notes. Frequently, collaborating with members of their community helped create a “feeling of the world getting smaller” and served as a salve for anxiety and uncertainty.
Blessed’s sophomore album Circuitous is slated for an October 28, 2022 release through Flemish Eye. “‘Circuitous: Of a route or journey, longer than the most direct way,” Blessed’s Drew Riekman recites. Interestingly enough, for the band, the word is a description of a profound and rare way of creating that makes their sophomore album, much like their previous releases, a singular, moving and unsettlingly committed piece of work.
Circuitous reportedly will further cement and expand upon the band’s status as a band’s band: a patient, eclectic outfit guided by reverence for and an intense pursuit of an internally-dictated creative agenda focused on musicality, songwriting, performance and artistic growth. The album sonically sees them sharpening their strengths and bringing more depth and expansion into their creative process. The end result is a sweeping, industrial art-rock tragedy rooted in walls of noise, tightly controlled drums, meandering ambient and staccato syncopation that was pulled from hours of jam material and hundreds of demos.
While the album’s eight tracks sprawl, thrash, burst and fall, the album’s material thematically touches upon agoraphobia, isolation, grief, the hyper control of capital and the numbness it breeds.
In the lead-up to the album’s release later this month, I’ve written about two album singles:
“Anything,” a slow-burning, hypnotic and brooding track featuring looping and shimmering guitars, bubbling electronics, thunderous drumming, and a propulsive and throbbing bass lines paired with Riekman’s plaintive vocals. But at its core, is a song that incisively ridicules modern life.
“The narrative that you can be anything if you work hard enough is absurd. It ignores so many facets of life, development, geography, class, on and on et al,” Blessed’s Riekman says in press notes. “But it pits people against each other in an effort to become ‘something’, a ‘something’ that is loosely defined and shaped by personality rather than a communal vision. It creates a pedestal to put yourself or others on. You’re never good enough, because there’s always someone above you doing more. We’re reaching for unattainable lifestyles, that we don’t even need, that are hyper individualistic and negate the need for community. When you’re looking at the environment you exist in socially as a pyramid, and there’s people you want to be closer to “at the top”, that’s a net negative for anyone. The more accessible we are, and on the level with each other we are in our immediate places, the more we gain.”
“Redefine,” a slow-burning and patient song centered around dexterous and shimmering acoustic guitar lines and jazz-like percussion paired with Riekman’s achingly plaintive delivery. While sonically “Redefine” may draw comparisons to OK Computer-era Radiohead, the song is rooted in longing for much more than the banality of wake, sleep, eat, work until you die.
“The idea that we cannot disrupt the status quo only serves someone with power over us,” Blessed’s Riekman says of the new single’s thematic concerns. “It’s easy to feel that you’re never doing enough, that your mere existence in the face of crushing weights of the world isn’t an act of triumph in itself. We’re generally fed a narrative at this juncture that no one works hard enough, and your circumstances are your own fault exclusively. Being told that the only path forward is working 10 hour days, volunteering your labor to companies that make billions, and that you’ll one day be rewarded is a farce.”
Built around scorching, angular guitar attack, bursts of glistening synths, walls of wailing feedback and distortion, mathematically precise drumming that alternates between thunderous and tightly controlled, a sinuous and propulsive bass line and Riekman’s expressive vocals, Circuitous‘ third and latest single is “Agoraphobia,” evokes a sense of creeping, woozy panic overtaking its narrator. But there’s the tacit understanding that only they are suffering and fearful — alone.
Dealing with moments of panic and crisis is confusing for the people around you,” Blessed’s Riekman explains. “Especially if you’re suffering from something that doesn’t have heft in the common day to day world. Wide open spaces and being far from home is generally exciting for most, and touring was a vehicle for me to feel that same feeling a lot of the time. But with so much home time, I was enveloped again with a sensation that makes little sense to anyone else, and attempted to open the door a little to that isolation.”
Hull, UK-based post-punk act Low Hummer — Daniel, Aimee, Steph, Jack, John, and Joe — can trace their origins through the individual members’ connections to their hometown’s DIY scene. After meeting and bonding over mutual interests, the sextet quickly established a regular rehearsal home at DIY venue The New Adelphi Club, where they were able to develop and hone a danceable take on post-punk that thematically focuses on their lives in East Yorkshire, their place in a consumerist world and bad news stories sold as gospel.
September 2019 saw the release of the their debut single “Don’t You Ever Sleep” through Leeds-based label Dance To The Radio. They quickly followed up with their second single “I Choose Live News” the following month. Both singles received rapturous praise from the likes of Clash,Dork, Gigwise and BBC 6 Music Recommends — with airplay on BBC 6.
Last year, the Hull-based post-punk outfit released their full-length debut Modern Tricks for Living, which featured “The People, This Place,” an angular post-punk that’s simultaneously danceable yet full of the seething disgust and frustration of someone who lives in a dead-end town, with dead-end people and no real options or opportunities.
Low Hummer’s latest single “Panic Calls” continues a remarkable run of incisive, coolly effortless and jittery post-punk built around propulsive Gang of Four-like bass lines and angular guitars and call and response vocals. The song evokes the anxious and jittery despair of someone at the end of their rope with an uncanny psychological realism.
The band explains that the song references the futility of mental health support by imitating the generic, automated answer machines of crisis lines.
Throughout the course of this site’s 12+ year history, I’ve spilled copious amounts of virtual ink covering Nashville-based indie rock act Palm Ghosts. Led by singer/songwriter and producer and Ice Queen Records founder Joseph Lekkas, Palm Ghosts can trace its origins to when Lekkas lived in Philadelphia: After spending a number of years playing in local bands like Grammar Debate! and Hilliard, Lekkas took a lengthy hiatus from writing, recording and performing music to book shows and festivals in and around the Philadelphia area.
Lekkas initially started Palm Ghosts as a solo recording project — and as a creative outlet to cope with an incapacitating bout of depression and anxiety. During a long, prototypically Northeastern winter, Lekkas recorded a batch of introspective songs that at the time, he dubbed “sun-damaged American music,” which eventually became the project’s full-length debut. After a short tour in 2013 to support the album, Lekkas packed up his belongings and relocated to Music City, enticed by its growing indie rock scene.
Much like countless musical acts across the globe, Lekkas and his bandmates spent the forced downtime of the pandemic, attempting to be as busy as they possible could: They wrote a ton of new material informed by a year or so of quarantine-related isolation, socioeconomic and financial instability, protests and demonstrations.
Last year, the JOVM mainstays released two albums, their fourth album, Lifeboat Candidate and their fifth album, Lost Frequency. Lifeboat Candidate was a fittingly dark, dystopian effort full of confusion, fear and dread that drew from the events and circumstances of the year preceding its release. Interestingly, Lost Frequency is a much different album: Initially scheduled for a 2020 release, Palm Ghosts’ fifth album harkens back to before the pandemic, when things seemed more or a less normal and carefree — or at least somehow a bit less uneasy and desperately urgent. In some way, the album’s material feels both celebratory, escapist, and perhaps even somewhat nostalgic. But paradoxically, the album’s material lyrically brings confrontation to the forefront, reminding the listener that nothing is normal — and that normalcy and the desire to return to it is extremely destructive.
The JOVM’s mainstays forthcoming sixth album Post Preservation reveals an entirely different side of the band. The album’s material features love songs — and there’s even a hint of optimism and some light showing through the cracks. But it’s still 2022, and there’s still plenty of darkness and discontent to the proceedings to balance the sunniness of much of the material. Conceived as a sort of soundtrack to a long lost John Hughes film, Post Preservation is full of nostalgic longing for a world that no longer exists, except in our hearts and minds.
Post Preservation‘s latest single “Signal” is a New Order-like, dance floor friendly bop featuring wiry guitar bursts, arpeggiated synths and relentless four-on-the-floor that’s rooted in the band’s unerring knack for enormous hooks and incisive social criticism. “Signal,” as the band explains “is about our dependent relationship with technology and the negative effects associated with it. Particularly, the increasing isolation that it eases and allows.”
Directed by Michael Patti, the accompanying video for “Signal” follows a man desperately attempting to escape his own reality in pursuit of a girl from another dimension.
“For ‘Signal,’ I wanted to explore an obsession for love just out of reach. We follow our lead as he attempts to escape his own reality, in pursuit of a girl from another dimension. She sends a signal from the other side that drives him to go to extraordinary lengths to get to her,” Patti explains. “The music video captures something that I believe we all have within ourselves. A longing to love and be loved. That distinct moment, when two people cross paths spark an instant connection, you can’t help but pursue it. That is what the story in the video tells.”
Asheville-based post-punk outfit and JOVM mainstays Secret Shame can trace their origins back to summer 2016 when Matthew (bass) and Lena (vocals) met through mutual friends. As a duo, the band released their self-titled debut EP, but they mostly stuck to hometown DIY shows.
Nathan, who had released the band’s debut EP, later joined on drums and not long after, Aster joined on guitar. The Asheville-based outfit’s full-length debut, 2019’s Dark Synthetics was released to widespread critical acclaim with album single “Calm” being featured on The New York Times‘ playlist, and the album landing on a number of that year’s Best-of-lists, including landing at #77 on Bandcamp Daily and #1 on Post-Punk.com.
Building upon that momentum, the band embarked on an East Coast tour, which kicked off at Hopscotch Festival. They also recorded a split 7″ single “Dissolve/Pure” with Aster as the band’s sole guitarist.
Throughout the band’s growing catalog, they’ve maintained a steadfast refusal to a single genre, but pull from a wide range of influences including post-punk, death rock, shoegaze and dream pop among others. But at the core of their sound is a palpable and uneasy tension between rage and melancholy, the beautiful and the bleak that finds some resolution in the way the music reflects the lyrics’ mood.
2022 has been a busy year for the Asheville-based JOVM mainstays: They headlined this year’s Dark Spring Boston and they’ve quickly become a regular presence at Hopscotch Music Festival. They’ve also spent much of the year touring extensively, opening for the likes of Xiu Xiu, Wednesday, Soft Kill, Choir Boy, and Vision Video.
Secret Shame’s highly-anticipated sophomore album Autonomy is slated for an October 28, 2022 release. Recorded at Asheville’s Drop of Sun with engineer/producer Alex Farrar, the album reportedly sees the JOVM mainstays reaching a new level of maturity both musically and lyrically: While the 11-song album may be diverse and yet cohesive, the album’s material is centered with lyrics that directly confront the realities of addiction, body dysmorphia, abuse and mental illness with an unvarnished honesty.
Autonomy‘s latest single “Color Drain” sees the JOVM mainstays taking up a dreamy, shoegazer-like take on post punk, in a way that recalls Cocteau Twins and others paired with Lena’s achingly plaintive vocals and enormous, catharsis-inducing choruses. Lyrically, the song features some of the most painfully honest lyrics in the band’s growing catalog: The song details Lena’s long battle with anorexia and how it feels to walk through the world in an apathetic and dissociative state after realizing that they both wanted help and didn’t want to accept that help.
Secret Shame will be embarking on a month-long East Coast tour throughout October and November that includes a November 13, 2022 stop at The Meadows. Check out the tour dates below.
With the release of 2020’s self-released, full-length debut, the Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada-based art rock/post punk outfit Blessed — Drew Riekman, Reuben Houweling, Jake Holmes and Mitchell Trainor — received attention for crafting a self-assured, fully formed sound and aesthetic informed by their reverence for their small, rural city, located in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley.
Last year’s iii EP saw the Abbotsford-based act further expanding upon their sound and approach: The EP’s material featured glitchy electronics, measured drum work and guitar work that frequently shifted from chiming and cheerful to serrated and snarling with a turn of a phrase, paired with Reikman’s tenor vocals. The EP continued the long-held ethos of collaboration and community that’s been at the center of their work. The self-produced EP was recorded at Vancouver-based Rain City Recorders with vocals tracked at friends’ houses across their hometown. They then recruited four different mixers for each EP’s song — Purity Ring’s Corin Roddick, Tortoise’s John McEntire, Holy Fuck‘s Graham Walsh and the band’s own Drew Riekman.
Blessed’s Drew Riekman credits Fraser Valley’s previous generation of DIY artists with fostering a strong sense of local responsibility, pride and solidarity that the band aims to perpetuate and continue for younger generations. In fact, they do so by attending city council meetings, by booking all-ages shows with local acts and by sharing resources with younger artists leaning the ropes of recording, touring and grant application.
iii‘s material as Riekman said at the time, reflected his own experiences and struggles with anxiety, which at its worse confined him to his home for months at a time. “I really struggled with agoraphobia when I was younger, and still do to this day,” Riekman said in press notes. Frequently, collaborating with members of their community helped create a “feeling of the world getting smaller” and served as a salve for anxiety and uncertainty.
Blessed’s sophomore album Circuitous is slated for an October 28, 2022 release through Flemish Eye. “‘Circuitous: Of a route or journey, longer than the most direct way,” Blessed’s Drew Riekman recites. Interestingly enough, the word is a description of a profound and rare way of creating that makes their sophomore album, much like their previous releases, a singular, moving and unsettlingly committed piece of work.
Circuitous reportedly will further cement and expand the band’s status as a band’s band: a patient, eclectic outfit guided by reverence for and an intense pursuit of an internally-dictated creative agenda focused on musicality, songwriting, performance and artistic growth. The album sonically sees them sharpening their strengths and bringing more depth and expansion into their creative process: The end result is a sweeping, industrial art-rock tragedy rooted in walls of noise, tightly controlled drums, meandering ambient and staccato syncopation that was pulled from hours of jam material and hundreds of demos.
While the album’s eight tracks sprawl, thrash, burst and fall, the album’s material thematically touches upon agoraphobia, isolation, grief, the hyper control of capital and the numbness it breeds.
Last month, I wrote about album single “Anything,” a slow-burning, hypnotic and brooding track featuring looping and shimmering guitars, bubbling electronics, thunderous drumming, and a propulsive and throbbing bass lines paired with Riekman’s plaintive vocals. But at its core, is a song that incisively ridicules modern life.
“The narrative that you can be anything if you work hard enough is absurd. It ignores so many facets of life, development, geography, class, on and on et al,” Blessed’s Riekman says in press notes. “But it pits people against each other in an effort to become ‘something’, a ‘something’ that is loosely defined and shaped by personality rather than a communal vision. It creates a pedestal to put yourself or others on. You’re never good enough, because there’s always someone above you doing more. We’re reaching for unattainable lifestyles, that we don’t even need, that are hyper individualistic and negate the need for community. When you’re looking at the environment you exist in socially as a pyramid, and there’s people you want to be closer to “at the top”, that’s a net negative for anyone. The more accessible we are, and on the level with each other we are in our immediate places, the more we gain.”
“Redefine,” Circuitous‘ second and latest single is slow-burning and patient song centered around dexterous and shimmering acoustic guitar lines and jazz-like percussion paired with Riekman’s achingly plaintive delivery. While sonically “Redefine” may draw comparisons to OK Computer-era Radiohead., the song is rooted longing for much more than the banality of wake, sleep, eat, work until you die.
“The idea that we cannot disrupt the status quo only serves someone with power over us,” Blessed’s Riekman says of the new single’s thematic concerns. “It’s easy to feel that you’re never doing enough, that your mere existence in the face of crushing weights of the world isn’t an act of triumph in itself. We’re generally fed a narrative at this juncture that no one works hard enough, and your circumstances are your own fault exclusively. Being told that the only path forward is working 10 hour days, volunteering your labor to companies that make billions, and that you’ll one day be rewarded is a farce.”
Continuing their ongoing collaboration with visual artists Nathan Donovan and Jacob Dutton, the artists and the band have begun to tease out a unique visual universe through a series of stills, images and video shorts. The duo’s latest video for “Redefine” is the second part of an animated diptych that features the android protagonist of the AI-inspired video for “Anything” in the same claustrophobic maze of corridors and doors. But the video tells a different side of the story: This time, the story unfolds through the perspective of security cameras and computers in an eerily, nondescript office, complete with a coffee mug right in the corner, and some Post-It notes.
Brooding and uneasy suspense are created through long, lingering shots that capture the monotony and banality of modern life. Without being given a clue to whether the viewer is seeing from the perspective of another observer or if they’re a fly on the wall, the viewer is forced to contemplate their complicity and role in the story.
