The members of Brighton, UK’s Muskets are all young enough to have been swallowed up by the grunge movement from the time that they were in diapers. The trudging and pissed-off genre began a slow-crawl towards world domination around the time that most, if not all of these boys were learning to walk and talk, and it’s clear that this had some effect on the style of music that Muskets is responsible for. In the Fall of last year, Muskets released their No Sleep Records debut–a collection of raw and emphatic songs called Chew that starts to beautifully collapse in on itself with its closing track, “Umbilical.”
“Umbilical” is slow and chaotic; like wearing cement boots in quicksand. It’s powerful and easily one of the stand-out tracks from the record, and I couldn’t be more excited to share the music video with y’all! For the video, Muskets took a lot of visual cues from bands they grew up watching and listening to. The video is mostly performance with a camera spinning in the midst of the action and when that’s paired with the lo-fidelity, almost VHS quality of the video, you can’t help but feel like they struck gold with this one. It’s the perfect marriage of audio and visuals and just allows everything that Muskets has worked to create to shine.
When asked about the video, Muskets said: “Umbilical is the last single from our debut record ‘Chew’. I wrote this song on an acoustic guitar in the early hours of the morning when I used to struggle with sleeping but we finished it collectively in a studio – messing around dynamics and structure to make a more sonically aggressive sound. I guess the lyrical content is about addiction, temptation and dependency and the process of disassociating yourself from reality. We created this video with the same director we’ve been working with throughout our record campaign, Chris Wade (Dogbrain video‘s) in the same Brighton studio we finalized the song in. It’s a pretty simple concept using a projector and a shit load of amps – we set out to recreate a similar aesthetic to the videos that bands we were inspired by growing up would release.”
Chew is out now via No Sleep Records. Snag your copy of the record here. The music video for “Umbilical” can be seen above.