Back in May, the Brooklyn synth-pop group Nation Of Language released their debut album Introduction, Presence. We were big fans of the LP, naming it Album Of The Week. In the summer, they returned with a cover of the Pixies song “Gouge Away.” Today, they’re back with a timely standalone single.

NOL’s latest is called “A Different Kind Of Life.” It was produced by Nick Millhiser of Holy Ghost! earlier this year, though it was written much longer ago. Here’s what frontman Ian Devaney had to say about it:

This song first started to come together in the early days of the Trump administration, but was never quite finished and got a bit lost as time went by. When the demo resurfaced during the pandemic, the song struck a chord not just in its intended political context but in the context of so many people losing family members, jobs, or any semblance of normality — whatever might be left of it after the past few years. I had seriously hoped that by the time the song came out it would be slightly less relevant than when I first wrote it, but defeating Trump was always going to be just one step in the fight to make the country a more just and decent place. So, no matter what, the core message still resonates with me deeply.

Though it’s one of the catchiest and most direct of the singles Nation Of Language have released this year, you can certainly feel the anger from 2016 in the song’s lyrics. Take, for example: “He checks all the boxes of a racist troglodyte.” But having been in the streets of New York to see what happened on the other side of it all, four years later, the chorus hits way differently now. Check it out below.