New York noise-rockers Uniforms are back with a cutthroat new single, “Dispatches from the Gutter,” from their forthcoming album Shame, out Sept. 11 via Sacred Bones. At less than three minutes, this track blends noise with unhinged hardcore and metallic riffs.
Filmmaker and director Jacqueline Castel says of the fiery accompanying music video:
The video was approached as a documented mass sigil informed by the historical and philosophical concept of self-immolation, performed under the lunar eclipse of Independence Day. Participants were asked to bring personal offerings to burn, and were given a directive to write down their intentions for the future, which were attached with accelerants to an effigy that was later cremated. It was a symbolic act of releasing what we wish to abandon, and an invocation of what we wish to rebuild.
Vocalist Michael Berdan added:
Aside from being a dear friend, Jacqueline has been a favorite director of all of ours for a very long time. Her stark aesthetic and eye for detail is without parallel. No one could have been better suited to create a visual representation of this song. Dispatches from the Guttertakes equal inspiration from Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Alan Moore’s Batman: The Killing Joke. It is about the fine line that many of us live on between times of relative stability and utter chaos, and what life is like once that fragile threshold is breached.
Preorder Shame here, and watch the video for “Dispatches from the Gutter” below.