Oklahoma City experimental outfit Brainwasher share fiery single "Burning Cars," delivering a textured yet gritty politically charged anthem that critiques political rhetoric, societal self-deception, and our collective tendency to cling to comfortable myths.
Framed by vintage indie rock, rip-hop and psych-rock, the track is elevated further by the atmospheric vocal layers courtesy of longtime friends and collaborators Spaceface. Rooted in their signature genre-defiant soundscapes, the track is funky and disorienting yet impactful as it continues to challenge norms.
About the track, Matthew Duckworth Kirksey shares, A little while back, while we were on tour in Europe with The Flaming Lips, our label asked about a video for ‘Burning Cars.’ One day, when we were playing in Cologne, we found out the city was evacuating a 10-mile radius to defuse three undetonated WWII bombs—just a normal part of reality there. The next day I was walking around Berlin, seeing all these powerful monuments to the war, thinking about what it must’ve been like. We actually wrote the song during the George Floyd protests—it's about how the world tells us things are getting better, but it feels like we’re not learning anything. It all felt connected.”
The track is accompanied by visuals, directed by longtime Flaming Lips collaborator Blake Studdard. Shot spontaneously over two nights in Germany, the video is thoughtful yet free flowing as it takes us through snippets of the weight these cities still carry.
The brainchild of Kirksey and Tommy McKenzie, Brainwasher delivers a warped blend of trip-hop, industrial, shoegaze, and new wave that feels stripped-out and chaotic all at once. With the track offering a peek at their experimental musicality, the duo are gearing up to release 10-track debut LP, 39 Lightyears from Heaven.
Set to draw us into a textured world of intuitive songwriting where offbeat rock collides with distorted electronica, the album which has been in the works for over ten years is set to mark the pair as a contemporary musical act to tune into.
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