Facebook has been around for so long at this point that it’s hard to remember whether or not we were aware of how clueless all of our parents’ friends were before they started endlessly reposting false information—and vehemently backing down on it when their friends and loved ones gently tried to challenge the posts’ sources—on the disgraced social media site. The truth is that nobody knows anything, and if that wasn’t entirely transparent to all of us before 2020, the year we had nothing else to do but reengage with our accounts, it certainly became clear upon scrolling through countless baseless claims about a virus which clearly none of us actually knew anything about.
When she announced her sophomore album somebody in hell loves you (unclear whether the titular hell has recently been rechristened “Meta”), Phoenix-based songwriter Sydney Sprague noted how the songs came together during this surreal early-pandemic period of panic, confusion, and, more generally, shifted perspective. “Everything was just floating in this void and because of that I felt like I had all the time in the world to just do whatever I wanted. It was weirdly the freest I've ever felt,” she recalled in a press release. “I spent a lot of time reflecting on the past and the people around me and processing things I’d never been able to. I was able to be more honest than I’d ever been in my songs.”
Part of that shift in perspective can be heard on one of the record’s boldest tracks, “nobody knows anything,” which pairs Sprague’s gentle, confident vocals to lyrics that sound as if she’s rocking the They Live sunglasses for the first time. “I saw what you said to my mother / I guess you don’t have any decency now,” she recites in what is perhaps the track’s most relatable line, as steady drums and minimal robotic bloops soundtrack the confrontation. “‘nobody knows anything’ is about people fighting about politics on the internet,” Sprague succinctly states, as the rest is pretty self-evident.
Arriving ahead of the album’s September 15 release via Rude Records, the single comes paired with a video which illustrates both Sprague’s indifferent vocal performance and the backing instrumental’s robotic ambiance as she stars as a Godzilla-sized automaton wreaking significantly less havoc on a city than your fourth-grade teacher in your mother’s replies. Check it out below, and pre-order the record here.
