"No one is bored, everything is boring," the late writer Mark Fisher once wrote. He was talking about how our boredom, "a capacity for absorption," has been replaced by anxiety -- "constant dispersal of attention, which is integral to capitalist cyberspace." Essentially, we're so overstimulated that we're tricked into thinking we need to attend to everything, buy everything, consume everything. But it's all shit, and the luxury of boredom is a dinosaur. That line of thinking or some variation of it inspired the latest single "Toyota Camry" by Australian new wavers Radio Free Alice.
The track, which announces their forthcoming EP Empty Words, is punchy with a snappy melody that feels like early Arctic Monkeys or Bloc Party. Some guitars swim in waves of reverb, while others are tire trucks on gravel, alongside a formidably anchoring bass. It's far from a dull song, but its lyrics fixate on boredom's biggest victim. "I believe in violence, the violence of killing time," vocalist Noah Learmonth proclaims at the end of the song's first verse.
"We recorded it with Peter Katis (Interpol, Bloc Party, Frightened Rabbit) in Connecticut in a house that resembled the one in Monster House, a horror movie for kids about a haunted house I watched growing up," Learmonth said about the song's recording experience. "Around the house were scattered Polaroids of other bands Peter had recorded albums with, legendary bands, like Interpol. Constantly stumbling across these fading Polaroids in the cutlery draw or whatever in the old wooden house felt weirdly fitting for the song — the song’s about lost futures, haunted by the past."
Watch the Finn Robilliard-directed video below.
Empty Words is out 8/20.
