Even among a genre defined by visceral yearning, the clamorous songs of awakebutstillinbed tend to stand out among those of their Midwest-emo peers with vocalist Shannon Taylor’s voice constantly cracking to belt out lyrics over her band’s flowing instrumentals—bolstered on their newly released second LP by engineer Jack Shirley, known for his work with Deafheaven and a slate of screamo/emoviolence acts. Leading up to the release of Chaos Takes the Wheel and I Am a Passenger (which was released just over a month ago by the recently resuscitated Tiny Engines), each of the LP’s singles arrived with a music video that featured the band ripping through the song—whether intercut with footage from a recent international tour or as a focused documentation of their tight live sets—as if to emphasize the fact that these songs were written to be moshed to.
Yet the group’s new visual for the album track “Adapt” takes a different approach, with animator Ethan Tran honing in on the song’s lyrical focus on life-as-difficult-commute (and perhaps one specific reference to the “redrawn lines” of our past) with a minimalist black-and-white visual full of traffic signs—and, of course, headbanging. “‘Adapt’ was the second to last song that was written for Chaos Takes the Wheel, and in a lot of ways it’s a sort of thesis statement for the most prominent themes of the album,” Taylor explains. “It’s also just personally one of my favorite ABSIB songs, and I was stoked we had an opportunity to work on a music video for it. Ethan Tran was a pleasure to work with, and I’m excited about how it all came together.”
Check out the video below, and the LP here.
