Even before launching his new project Activity at the onset of the pandemic, Travis Johnson’s music has always had an uneasy feel about it. Starting with his work fronting the noise-rock outfit Grooms through most of the last decade, there was an air of mystery surrounding everything he put to tape, with the more post-punk-leaning Activity—which additionally features Jess Ress from fellow Brooklynites Russian Baths on guitar—exploring the darkest crevices of those sounds. But with the latest single from this new outfit’s aptly titled sophomore album, Spirit in the Room, Johnson nearly pays explicit homage to the bureaucratic lab-rat labyrinths depicted in the works of Kafka that feel more relevant every year.
As the ambient sounds of “Department of Blood” slowly build over its three-and-a-half-minute runtime it becomes increasingly clear that it isn’t heading toward climax—the ballooning tension, instead, is the single’s focal point. It feels like tunneling deeper into the everyday rabbit holes of frequently rerouted phone calls to health insurance providers, catfishing Craigslist apartment listings, and other opaque phenomena of the modern age. “Department of Blood,” according to Johnson, was inspired by “the feeling of knowing you’re being manipulated by something way more powerful than you and also knowing you can do absolutely nothing about it. Just that resignation. It seemed to work.”
Equally unnerving is the visual Johnson filmed for the track, which sees faceless wax figurines burned and melted. Evidently an NDA permits him to expand upon the clip any further, which seems appropriate for both the song and visual. “I was working in a dank, cold parking garage in the middle of winter on a mysterious electronics project that I’m not supposed to talk about, and still don’t really understand,” he allows. “It was freezing in there and I was also having the worst anxiety and depression I’d had in my adult life, so I felt insane every day. In the trash there, I found these little miniature figures and started taking these grotesque closeups of them.”
Check it out below, and pre-order Spirit in the Room here.
