Last month, LA psychedelic rockers Frankie and the Witch Fingers returned with a new single called “Mild Davis,” which continued the punky retro haze the group has come to be known for within a community of like-minded artists in their Southern Californian garage-rock scene. Yet “Futurephobic,” the follow-up single from their forthcoming record Data Doom, feels much more in line with the album title’s vintage dystopian sci-fi connotations, swapping weed-smoke riffs for frigid new wave pulses and staccato vocal deliveries.
“The main riff was an idea we came up with during the writing process for our album Monsters Eating People Eating Monsters…but we kept it in our back pockets, as it wasn’t quite fitting in with the theme of that album,” the band shares. “When we started writing Data Doom, it reemerged very organically and everyone latched onto the idea surprisingly fast and ran with it. We expanded on the main riff and came up with the other parts and overall arrangement while writing with our new lineup in our studio in LA. The whole process went surprisingly smoothly. We added backing vocals and overdubs while on tour last year in Europe, doing all the passes to complete the song from various apart-hotels, attics in France and Amsterdam.”
Although the recording process was smooth, the recording’s post-punky flow is anything but. To match the song’s ’80s B-movie aesthetic is a video that leans into that decade’s sci-fi/horror imagery, wherein Ronald McDonald does a pretty bad job of selling the viewer his product. Check it out below, and pre-order Data Doom here.
