Baltimore indie pop act Lower Dens have announced a new album, The Competition, out September 6th, with an unsettling new music video for its lead single.
In “Young Republicans,” the band’s own Jana Hunter travels through a time warp – Fifties nostalgia by way of the 1980s – and ends up confronting a disturbing suburban cult dressed in red. Hunter goes from narrator of the cult’s seemingly benign activities to their prisoner and, eventually, an unwitting participant in a gruesome ritual. We won’t spoil it here, but let’s just say the socialite characters in the video are quite interested in consuming the lower classes – both figuratively and literally.
The Competition will be the follow-up to Lower Dens’ 2015 album Escape From Evil. Hunter said of the album’s genesis in a statement: “The issues that have shaped my life, for better or for worse, have to do with coming from a family and a culture that totally bought into this competitive mindset. I was wild and in a lot of pain as a kid; home life was very bleak, and pop songs were a guaranteed escape to a mental space where beauty, wonder, and love were possible. I wanted to write songs that might have the potential to do that.”