Based on name alone, you might assume that Kingston, New York’s Open Head make extremely gnarly beatdown. That would be incorrect. Open Head’s music isn’t devoid of gnarl, but it falls more on the blurry post-punk side of things. Early next year, they’ll release their new album What Is Success, and we’ve posted their tracks “Catacomb” and “House.” Today, they’ve also shared the seething, clanking new track “N.Y. Frills.” Here’s how Open Head describe it:

In a sort of homage to New York no wave, “N.Y. Frills” is an encounter with the monotone Goliath that is Manhattan. Our guitarist Brandon Minnervini sings the song, and together with bassist Jon McCarthy he wrote it while working for a fabrication business in Kingston, sanding designer aluminum shelving. Every so often, Brandon would be tasked with delivering the products to ultra-wealthy patrons in New York City.

A drive that started at a dusty Kingston warehouse would end in the alien opulence of a Manhattan penthouse, or a private AI sports betting clubs, or a “development workshop” full of untouched fabrication machines occupying prime Manhattan real estate, and then back again. Brandon brushed up against the type of wealth most never see. The song is a meditation on contact with those who live with such extravagance and their detachment from those who make it possible on physical and material level. From a similar perspective, the song describes Open Head’s relationship with New York City in general — one of both proximity and distance, where the city is always within reach, yet the band is always a visitor, an outsider to its tempo, its density, and its size.

Lyrically, the song is the return journey from a brush with the extravagant. It begins in the high-rise, amidst the luxury class, and with each verse drops “lower still,” until the narrator sinks to become the ground itself — no different than the physical earth that supports the weight of the city. “Heaven’s gate, sink and wait, object love, interest rates.”

Hear “N.Y. Frills” below.

What Is Success is out 1/24 on Wharf Cat.