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Today, the Burlington, VT-based rock band Brunch have released "Please Kill Me" and "Man Alive", two double A-Side singles that cannonball the timeless, irreverent charm of class punk into the future. Bouncing back from their 2024 EP DOGINYA, as well as last year's follow-up Live At Robot Dog, members Philip Bern (guitar), Mason Kosman (bass), Ayden Flanigan (drums), and Cameron Mincar (guitar) have masterfully incorporated some of the best ideas from their previous releases, including influences from existential and political philosophy, clever lyricism directly referencing and engaging with literature and music history, irreverent instrumentation that evokes decades worth of rock music without belonging to any one genre or tradition, and vocal harmonies and musical interplay that clearly express each member’s individual personalities.
LISTEN: "PLEASE KILL ME" AND "MAN ALIVE"
The songs are two sides of the same coin, both exploring myths and what happens when they collapse, whether it be rock and roll, identity, memory, and love. "Please Kill Me", named after the iconic oral history of classic punk, braids the memory of Phil Spector's "Wall Of Sound" recordings for psych pop-era Beatles, with instrument and synthesizers of every era, Marxist philosophy that curdles the lyrics into souring, biting commentary on nostalgia and the stagnation of cultural memory.
Play it at CBGB's before The New York Dolls crash on stage; play it at Brooklyn's Purgatory in front of all the post-punk scenesters of today. (In fact, Brunch will be debuting the track there tonight!) "The song sounds almost like it could belong to any decade without exactly belonging to any of them," say the band.
"Please Kill Me" comes with a DIY, grainy new music video shot like a home video documenting the band's exciting day at the Devil's Bowl Speedway, complete with a guerrilla-shot, full, electric rock performance at New England’s Fastest Dirt Race Track. One of the craziest, loudest days they ever experienced together, the band recalls:
"Halfway through the race there was a huge four car pileup that took a construction crew 30 minutes to remove from the track while everyone watched. You can see in the video our reactions to the crash and the clean-up — the cars were totaled but thankfully none of the drivers were hurt. After the race the owners let us out onto the tracks in our van and we set up right in the middle and played along to the song. Before we left, we all piled into the back of the van and played our instruments while our friend drove us around the track. It was a bumpy ride, but the excitement of that night comes across in the video and matches the energy of 'Please Kill Me' perfectly."
WATCH: "PLEASE KILL ME" MUSIC VIDEO
The second single "Man Alive" finds the band getting lost in new territory, coating a shimmering, synthwave gloss over a dark, romantic rock track. It may be Brunch’s most vulnerable and personal song yet, invoking the poetry of Jorge Borges, the films and music of David Lynch, and the writings of James Joyce and Hakuri Murakami to portray the spiral into the cavernous depths of depression before escaping out the other side through the transcendent power of love.
"It’s about struggling with the difficulties of being a human while holding onto radical hopefulness and love for others, a topic deeply influenced by existential philosophy," adds the band. "It’s a song about radical antagonisms; light and darkness, dreams and reality, each defining itself by its own opposite."
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