Each of Olivia Awbrey’s songs is an intricate story in itself, weaving disparate-yet-unavoidable topics like internet surveillance and strong personal connections into the same guitar-heavy pop-punk ballad. The prospect of a music video for one of her songs almost seems redundant considering how visceral her lyrics are, yet the Chelsea Zerba and Brian Jackson–directed clip for her latest single from her forthcoming LP Dishonorable Harvest only doubles down on the aforementioned themes inherent to “Geolocation at P.A.M.”
The track itself, Awbrey notes, deals specifically with bonding with chosen family over largely unpopular political and personal beliefs. “On the surface it’s a song about personal privacy, data mining, and internet surveillance, a topic that severely disturbs me,” Awbrey explains. “But overall it’s about the friendships and the relationships we form that are real, tangible, and at this point our greatest weapon against the debilitating disorientation the current administration is inflicting on its own people.”
The video spells Awbrey’s lyrics out quite literally at points, opening with a line about meeting a friend at the Portland Art Museum, as we see her doing just that. As the song builds into a dense crescendo, the cast relocates to another Portland hub, the Alberta Street Pub, to let the song end with a sense of improvised jam. “Chelsea, the director, and I wanted to keep [the video] lo-fi while still telling a significant story about two friends or partners who choose trust and solidarity over ‘ratting each other out’ as the song sings. I feel like we were able to capture that feeling of urgency and need for strong personal connections that so many of us are feeling during a time of political distress and uncertainty.”
Dishonorable Harvest is out May 1 via Awbrey’s own Quick Pickle Records. You can pre-order it here.
