There’s a certain lethargy to Hockitay’s experimental solo recordings that feels primed to the dusty sounds of slowcore, with the Montreal-based songwriter’s proclivity to pen songs about burnout feeling equally apt. Following his thrumming single “Over/Over” from February, the artist returns today with another new single called “Buttons” that leans further into the realm of somnambulistic acoustic rock—even if the recording may have a bit too much of a buoyant groove to it to be reasonably classified as slowcore. The cut feels spiritually descendent from OK Computer–era Radiohead, even down to its lyrics honing in on the lifestyle of the elite class as it contrasts with our own.
“’Buttons’ came from this feeling that the beauty of life is lost on those in power,” shares Hockitay. “The phrase ’buttoning and unbuttoning’ is actually from an old apocryphal suicide note from the 1700s. I don’t know where I learned about it, but it’s stuck with me since. It perfectly describes this very human exhaustion that’s both timeless and current.”
Like the song itself, the track’s music video takes familiar imagery and filters it through a surrealist lens, with its rural domestic scenes looking a bit like the black-and-white world of Dorothy’s Kansas. Check it out below.
