Automatic is in full gear with the release of two new videos (Venus Hour & New Beginnings) from their forthcoming album “Excess” and a killer tour with Idles.
ICYMI – Grab the first singles from Automatic’s forthcoming album Excess coming via Stones Throw on June 24th. On this new album, Automatic synthesizes a new strain of retrofuturist motorik pop. The album rides the imaginary edge where the ‘70s underground met the corporate culture of the ‘80s, taking aim at corporate culture and extravagance, or, as the band puts it, “That fleeting moment when what was once cool quickly turned and became mainstream, all for the sake of consumerism.”
On “New Beginning” – inspired by the Swedish sci-fi film Aniara – Automatic reject the false hope of leaving behind a scorched planet and searching for “a better place”, at a moment when the ultra-rich are eyeing manned space travel. Automatic’s Izzy Glaudini originally wrote “Venus Hour” as an ode to “psycho-feminine energy”. The song is “about whatever it is inside you that makes you want to do that thing that isn’t logical, or safe. Though the album grapples with contemporary concerns – the exodus of the super-rich from an uninhabitable Earth, the precarity of the art life, Gen Z inheriting the planet at the eleventh hour – the album’s final message is clearly one of solidarity, rather than despair.
