As is the case with most of the tracks on Michael Love Michael’s recent To Build Me a House LP, it’s a little ambiguous as to whether the message on album standout “Death Row” is personal or political. Refrains of “Gimme pleasure” seem to clash with recitations of the repeated line “The first thing we have to change / Is absolutely everything,” a rallying cry that could be applied to nearly every facet of our broken American system, be it bigotry, capitalism, or the many places the two intersect. But this constant merging of public and private identities is intentional—as if to say that the personal can’t exist without the political. Or, maybe more accurately, can’t exist with our current political situation.
“The song is really a call to action, as many of my songs tend to be, but it’s about questioning our own apathy first,” Michael Love Michael—a.k.a. Michelle—shares. “We live in a world that often encourages disconnection and isolation, saying that this is strength. I don’t think we should have to wait until we’re almost dead to uplift or care more for each other as human beings. It’s been said time and again, but it's true that none of us are truly free until we’re all free.
While To Build Me a House dropped at the tail end of 2022, Michelle waited until now to reveal the track’s official video, intentionally targeting today’s holiday. “The fact that the video comes out on Juneteenth, which also happens to fall within Pride Month, is totally intentional,” she continues. “I always like to release sonic and visual messages around collective liberation around this time, to remind people that as a human species, though our freedom is often bound up in each other’s self-created prisons, there is another way forward.”
The self-directed video was based on an editorial shot by Brett Lindell, with Santiago Castillo styling the looks and capturing the live footage. Michelle notes that she “felt the story of the song could be embodied by what I was conveying through the clothes… Brett, Santiago, and I were creating a gothic sort of couture shoot, and since we had all the looks ready, I thought we might as well shoot a music video in between set-ups for each shot and look. Travis [McClung] edited the footage so beautifully, capturing the haunted shoegaze elements of the song with a lot of light and then moving into a more psychedelic and bold aesthetic for the song’s rhythmic second half.”
Check it out below, and revisit the LP here.
