Barely two years removed from their debut, Vermont’s Robber Robber return at the end of the week with their second album and first for Fire Talk Records, Two Wheels Move the Soul. The project furthers the band’s agenda of eliminating the boundaries between tightly wound post-punk and free-flowing noise-pop, with the final pre-album single “New Year’s Eve” additionally contributing to the record’s slacker-rock lyrical sensibilities. “I’m tired, so is everyone / How can I complain?” sings Nina Cates, delivering a sentiment all too familiar to this moment in history that’s particularly difficult to unplug one’s self from.
Despite channeling a sense of burn out, the music video Noah Lenker (brother of Adrianne) made for “New Year’s Eve” emphasizes the band’s inherent playfulness as it sees the quartet applying their DIY sensibilities to time travel. “Sometimes the barrage of information and stimuli that radiates from our devices makes us feel as though we’re being tumbled about in a dissociative void of lights and noise,” Lenker shares of his vision for the clip. “Perhaps the remedy to these dystopian implements is not to deny and try to push them back into their pandora’s box, but to reconfigure them to be wielded in a more empowering way. But can we really expect that zooming about the matrix of the modern world will catapult us to sci-fi utopia? The antagonizing forces that threaten our existence may dissipate, but new challenges will always take form. In the end, seeking a perfect world might only make us less present to appreciate what good there already is around us. Perhaps the only utopia that can be reached exists within the friendships and bonds that we make along the passage of time.”
“He’s a mad scientist,” Cates adds of Lenker’s work on the video—which also extends into the minute-long song that follows “New Year’s Eve” on the album’s track list, “Imprint.” “It was extremely fun to make, which really translated into the video. It’s loosely about the confusion of watching time pass by. Feel free to cry while watching it.”
Check it out below, and pre-order Two Wheels ahead of its release this Friday here.
