The Oklahoma rock band Skating Polly have just announced that they’ll release their fifth full-length, The Make It All Show, later this year. It’s the follow-up to last year’s New Trick EP, which was a collaboration with Veruca Salt’s Louise Post and Nina Gordon. They worked with a similarly revered musician for the album’s lead single, “Queen For A Day”: X’s Exene Cervenka — who also produced their 2013 album, Lost Wonderfuls — co-wrote the song with them and serves as a featured background vocalist. In a press statement, Skating Polly’s Kelli Mayo explains how the collab came about and what the song was inspired by:

The lyrics for this song came from a conversation we had backstage with Exene about the old game show Queen For A Day. The premise of the show was that women with tragic stories (sick children, dead husbands, poverty, etc) would compete against each other for applause from the audience. The winner would get a washing machine or whatever household prize they asked for and be crowned Queen For A Day. Months after this conversation Exene sent me lyrics in a text and we wrote the song around them. She’s singing on the second and third choruses too.

Both the song and its accompanying video play out the obviously negative aspects of a competition that’s based on who can present as the most traditionally feminine, and they extrapolate from that ’40s and ’50s game show mindset at show how those competitive elements are sadly all too applicable today. “We wanted the video to emulate the old show but also look like it was directed by John Waters,” Mayo says.

Watch and listen below.

TOUR DATES:
03/21 Boise, ID @ Treefort Music Festival
03/24 Los Angeles, CA @ Teragram Ballroom *
03/25 San Diego, CA @ The Casbah *
03/27 San Francisco, CA @ The Independent *
03/29 Portland, OR @ Doug Fir *
03/30 Seattle, WA @ Neumos *
03/31 Vancouver, BC @ The Fox Cabaret *
04/25 Salt Like City, UT @ Kilby Court
04/28 Columbus, OH @ Rumba Cafe
04/29 Indianapolis, IN @ Melody Inn
05/02 Richmond, VA @ The Camel #
05/03 Raleigh, NC @ Kings #
05/06 Pensacola, FL @ Vinyl #
05/08 Austin, TX @ Stubb’s Indoor #
05/09 Dallas, TX @ Three Links #
05/11 Denver, CO @ Marquis Theater #
05/12 Colorado Springs, CO @ Black Sheep #
05/14 Kansas City, MO @ RecordBar #
05/15 Davenport, IA @ Raccoon Motel #
05/17 Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle #
05/18 Ferndale, MI @ Loving Touch #
05/19 Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern #
* w/ the Go! Team
# w/ Charly Bliss

The Make It All Show is out 5/4 via El Camino.