Toronto’s Motorists dropped the music video for Surrounded.
The third and final single is taken from their debut album Surrounded which comes out on September 3, 2021 via We Are Time (USA), Bobo Integral (ROW), Debt Offensive (CAN)
A trilogy of their cool DIY retro music videos from Vainglorious and Right Through You.
A upbeat jangly indie pop rock throwback vibe.
About the track:
The track arrives with another visual installment created by Craig Fahner and Michelle Lemay, mirroring the aesthetic of earlier singles to draw on the German TV show, Beat Club. The album-titled single provides another fervent display of the band’s penchant for pop melody and nose-diving guitar riffs. Thematically, it captures the band’s collective feeling at the start of the COVID lockdown. The song’s narrator, increasingly fed up with the trappings of their surroundings, hops from place to place in an effort to get away from it all. But where on Earth do you go when you feel like there’s “too much water” and “too much land”? “It’s about the impossibility of being alone with one’s self,” guitarist/singer, Craig Fahner says, “since we ultimately construct ourselves within a phenomenological bubble full of some stuff we have chosen and some stuff we have no control over.” Eventually, the narrator ends up back where they started, but the journey comes with a realization that removing yourself from your frustrations only leaves you less equipped to deal with them when hiding is no longer an option.
Driving is a huge part of rock and roll’s enduring mythology. Images of cruising down the highway with friends and lovers while basking in the freedom of the open road pervade pop music’s lyrical canon. Yet, so often, these idealized images clash with the everyday drudgery of being a motorist: traffic jams, detours, and bad news on the radio.
This tension is central to Surrounded, an album that is as much about the colourful possibilities of life as it is about the way those possibilities are boxed in by technologies. In a world where everyone’s been in their own bubble, Motorists have pushed theirs together and worked through feelings of isolation as a group to the tune of jangly guitars, infectious power-pop hooks, and a steady motorik beat. Surrounded is an album about modern living and, as Fahner succinctly describes, “isolation in a technologically saturated society, laden with romanticism around radical togetherness.”
Surrounded gets:
/10.
