Blending punk energy with horror movie camp, Los Angeles quartet The Paranoyds might just have stumbled upon the ideal sound for our times. How better to capture the moment than with a sound at once terrifying and unserious, driven by a hyperactive energy that’s both anxious and fun?
Following on from last year’s full-length album Carnage Bargain, the band are back with a brand new single, Pet Cemetery. Again out via Suicide Squeeze Records, the release sees them embrace this style. The title single in particular, its spooky organ and creeping sense of foreboding cut with a certain off-kilter meanness. A volatility, suggestive of dark things threatening to re-emerge into the night.
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B-side ‘Hotel Celebrity’ might forgo darkness, but proves no less chilling. The song is a “collagen-infused, loving tribute to Californian vapidity and obnoxia,” explains band member Lexi Funston, and this sneering attack doubles up as its own horror story. A terrible tale haunted not by any zombie or wolfman, but a pervasive, dizzying emptiness. The void of the contemporary moment, existing as it does not in shadows but the bright white light of attention. “Becoming, undoing, aging,” Funston continues. “Is it all just a mirage?”
The song comes complete with a video directed by Amber Navarro, which visualises these themes as a garish body horror. Check it our below:
Pet Cemetery is out today via Suicide Squeeze Records and you can get it from The Paranoyds Bandcamp page.
