Four years back we shared “I Recollect,” a delicate yet dramatic indie ballad from Leeds rockers Living Body. The group remains active, led by Chicago native Jeff T. Smith and also featuring Katie Harkin (Harkin, Sleater-Kinney, Courtney Barnett), Alice Rowan (Mayshe-Mayshe), Tom Evans (Vessels) and Sarah Statham (Crake, Fig By Four). Today they’re back with a short but memorable track that shows they can do high-energy rippers too.

Living Body recorded “I Do” for a new Short Songs compilation their North American label Kingfisher Bluez is releasing for this weekend’s Record Store Day festivities. The release, available in select indie shops this Saturday, features 12 songs on one 7″ record, including work from Rose Melberg, Quiet Boy, U.S. Highball, 55 Deltic and Marlaena Moore. Living Body’s fuzzed-out and jangly guitar-pop track is “dedicated to Jeff Bezos, who through his own questionable behaviour has managed to increase his personal wealth by 76 billion US dollars in the first 5 months of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Smith elaborates that “I Do” targets not just the Amazon overlord but other big-tech giants such as Spotify, Google, and Facebook:

While these corporations appear to make our lives easier, we are in no way fully aware how they are manipulating our psyches, preying on our insecurities and monitoring our every move to fatten their pockets. Amazon specifically can understand a person so well based on their online history that they actually have products picked out in warehouses ready to ship before they are even ordered. This is called “anticipatory shipping,” where in the not-so-distant future we will be billed and sent products we never actively ordered because an algorithm decided we need them. As humans, we crave ease, so we have a tendency to normalize this questionable corporate behavior for the sake of simplicity, especially as society becomes increasingly overwhelmed with distractions, which are often only exacerbated by these very tech companies. Though this song was written in late 2019, it is clear that through the current pandemic, we are more reliant on these corporations than ever before.

Hear “I Do” below.