Recently I was able to connect with TVOD (short for Television Overdose), to ask the band about their electric-charged new single, “Uniform.” The track comes from the Brooklyn, NY punk band’s debut LP, Party Time, that releases on May 9th. In this interview, I asked the band about the new single and music video, plus I had TVOD describe their live shows. If you’re enjoying the new single, please consider pre-ordering Party Time here.
The video for “Uniform” has a strong visual identity—what inspired the concept, and how does it reflect the song’s themes?
The song is, of course, about work – shitty work, at a shitty job, that you don’t want to do – and the feeling of dissonance that comes with buttoning up your tidy little uniform while the world at large is falling apart around you. We wanted the video to feel a bit unsettling and dystopian without taking ourselves too seriously – and it’s a short song so we had to pack in a lot of story with visual clues alone.
TVOD is known for high-energy live performances—did you aim to capture that same raw intensity in the video, and if so, how?
Not really – there is very little performance in the video, and when we do finally get there, it goes pretty poorly for our hero. If anything, we wanted to highlight that bands like us aren’t the kind you want to take home to mom – we may look nice on the factory floor but you might get more than you bargained for. I think that does say something about us as a live band, but the video wasn’t about trying to emulate what we do in front of a live audience. I don’t think it’s something that can really be captured in this format, and we weren’t fixing to try.
Was there a specific message or feeling you wanted viewers to take away from watching “Uniform”?
The not-so-subtle message is about commodification, specifically of music and musicians. The use of art for clout and social climbing, corporate exploitation of artists for “cool currency”, social media eye-candy campaigns – all transactional relationships that result in art being snatched up, paraded around, and quickly discarded. I think there’s still a lot of questions that linger around this band-for-hire – are we robots, are we pets, are we malicious or friendly? I like that there’s room for the viewer to wonder what’s going on in our heads as we stumble around, stuck in the middle of this commodification, doing our own damn thing and causing trouble.