I don’t think when Tod Browning made his iconic freakshow feature Freaks 90 years ago he had quite the same visual palette in mind as Atlanta-based songwriter Izzy Spears for his own ode to misfits. The latest single from his forthcoming debut EP Monstar arrives just in time for Halloween, with the unique and fairly unsettling track pairing with a lyric video that’s flat-out bizarre.
Mantras like “Show teeth, chug bleach” get tossed around with cool detachment over pounding bass and a disorienting beat that feels like it exists within the same unnavigable territory as Yves Tumor’s music (“I can't give my specific influences away...if i do that we'll have 100,000 Izzy Spears clones running around before 2023,” he says with a laugh)—all of which gets set to unhinged animation that defies explanation.
“I would say ‘Freaks’ is my anthem song,” Spears shares. “Every musical body of work needs one. The writing came natural, straight from the head once I heard the banjo. I wrote the song in one day in a session with Duskdriven describing the personality traits of certain people we know.”
Check out the lyric video below, and brace yourself for Monstars’s November 11 release via KRO.
