Watch: Motorists Unleash New Single/Video "Surrounded"

Toronto-based motorik jangle-pop trio Motorists have released the video for their new single "Surrounded".

The song is taken from their upcoming debut studio album 'Surrounded', which will be available on September 3 through We Are Time/Bobo Integral/Debt Offensive. Pre-order your copy here.

"Surrounded" 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 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.

Watch/listen below.

Tags: Motorists

Watch: Motorists Release New Single/Video "Vainglorious"

Toronto-based motorik jangle-pop trio Motorists have released the video for their new single "Vainglorious".

The song is taken from their forthcoming debut studio album 'Surrounded', which will be available on September 3 through We Are Time/Bobo Integral/Debt Offensive. Pre-order your copy here.

Vainglorious brings another visual installment created by Craig Fahner and Michelle Lemay, mirroring the aesthetic of "Through To You" to draw on the 80's German TV show, Beat Club. The song presents another example of the band's knack for head-jerking riffs and understanding of a tight pop melody, dealing with feelings of alienation examined through a political lens. While veering away from being too heavy-handed, it weighs up how the people in charge might say all the right things to make you feel comfortable, while actively working against your best interests in practice.

“We have seen the work that is actually done from the front lines to make things better for vulnerable people while our representatives do absolutely nothing, and yet they continue to congratulate themselves as progressive leaders,” Fahner says, recounting the failures of Canada’s national and local politicians. "We have seen this with our prime minister’s smiling embrace of environmental justice causes, while actively campaigning for and benefiting from the Canadian petrostate off camera. Or locally, with our mayor presenting himself as a man of the people, as someone providing solutions for people living in poverty, while, in actuality, operating as surrogate for the real estate industry that would actively like to obliterate poor people from the landscape." Motorists wonder out loud how one could stand to live such a paradoxical life and stand for nothing, these do-nothings are designated with the biblical sin of vainglory—“all of the pride, none of the substance.”

Watch/listen below.

Tags: Motorists