They say love is gone
Check out this brand new plastic future
I won’t let love go
As I let go of the future
New York City’s A Place To Bury Strangers tear through the wreckage of our home planet with Plastic Future, a blistered and burning decree against the rot of modern life. The hypnotic, heart-wrung single from their forthcoming seventh album, Synthesizer (via Dedstrange), stomps, snarls, and shudders forward, a maelstrom of distortion and defiance.
A Place To Bury Strangers have long been architects of beautiful ruin, their sound a cathedral of clatter and collapse, but here, something shifts. Oliver Ackermann’s deadpan delivery drags under the weight of realization, a voice smothered in static, drained of illusion, watching the wreckage smolder. The Joy Division influence looms large; this is less a song than an elegy, a last rites sermon for a world suffocating in its own indifference.
Plastic Future spits its disdain with teeth bared: power chokes, exclusion festers, greed gulps down every last flicker of grace. Yet beneath the detonation of noise, the band wrestles with their own reflection…where does resistance end and complicity begin? The song lunges between lament and rebellion, clawing at the edges of something just out of reach. The Plastic Future looms, sterile and gleaming, but in the static, in the cracks, something still fights, refuses, rages…unwilling to vanish into silence.
Director Dylan Mars Greenberg twists the knife with a grin, draping Plastic Future in a delirium of neon and nightmares. The video burns bright and sickly, its colours dialed up to a fever pitch, disguising something far more sinister beneath the gloss. Figures flicker and writhe, trapped in a world that smiles as it swallows them whole. Giant letters spell out the roles we inherit, the parts we play, the masks we wear until they harden into something inescapable.
A corrupt priest prowls, a parasite in sacred robes, his hands slick with deception, his sermons drenched in rot. A faceless hunger looms, gnawing at the edges of existence, swallowing bodies whole without a second glance. Here, Jonestown lingers in the air like poison, Dante’s Inferno sprawls out beneath every trembling step. It is a kindergarten passion play where innocence meets its executioner; where the devil and nature lock horns, and neither side flinches.
What Greenberg conjures is a funhouse reflection of the horror beneath the gloss, a world where the sickness is hidden in plain sight, flashing in dizzying technicolor, humming beneath the surface. The future arrives in plastic, smiling as it devours.
Watch below:
Dylan Mars Greenberg is a New York City-based filmmaker, musician, and video artist known for her surreal, genre-blending work. She has directed feature films such as Dark Prism, ReAgitator: Revenge of the Parody, and Amityville: Vanishing Point. Her music video credits include Michael C. Hall’s Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, Speedy Ortiz, and James Chance. Greenberg also co-founded the band Theophobia and directed Spirit Riser, featuring Amanda Flowers and narrated by Michael Madsen.
Post-Punk.com tracked down APTBS frontman Oliver Ackermann and Dylan Mars Greenberg at Lucky 13 Saloon, tucked deep in the raw heart of Gowanus, Brooklyn. The bar, thick with graffiti and lurid stories, plays host to VIDEODOME, Greenberg’s monthly screening series backed by Last Week’s New Yorker Review. A neon-lit refuge for the underground, the event rallies NYC’s restless talents, raising funds for her close friend Christine Campbell. The rules are simple: films must be under fifteen minutes, and creators must be there in person to face the crowd. That night, Ackermann (and Campbell!) sat among them, proudly watching Plastic Future flicker across the screen.
“When I created VIDEODOME, part of my intent was to specifically create an offline community where we wouldn’t have to worry about art being censored or shadowbanned,” Greenberg said. “The other, primary reason was to find a way to raise money for my friend Christine, who is a black disabled trans woman. Every dollar towards admission at VIDEODOME goes to her, as the venue has agreed not to take a cut. Things like this are not only true allyship, but effective allyship. To put your money where your mouth is, is worth a thousand words, infographics, or mantras.”
Post-Punk.com: Tell me a little bit about the song for the video.
Ackermann: It’s one of the songs of Synthesizer. It’s kind of like, a dance club sort of song, sort of the vibe of sneaking through a club, finding your way around. In every song that I write there’s the foundation of love and lust and longing, hatred and disappointments…all sorts of stuff, the musical journey.
Is it in the same vein as your other stuff, or does it go in a completely different direction?
Ackermann: There are always simple things that are sort of different. There’s stuff that is more popular, but there’s always elements of change, like feedback and noises where they’ll build up the volume of the guitar. You got me playing the drums.
Your band lineup has changed! It’s an intense process when you’re changing up people, your creative flow, how you express yourselves.
Ackermann: …Yeah, you really want to work with the people you want to work with! You want to kind of put yourself out there creating something, and push yourself further when it comes from a vulnerable place. And so it’s really helpful to have people who understand that vulnerability. I saw other videos that Dylan had made, and thought, “wow, this is so cool!”
Greenberg: My initial concepts were waaaay over the top, like $30,000! (laughing) So, Oliver just told me to pick a song off the album…I went to Plastic Future, and around the same time I heard it, I had this dream…and a lot of the things in the video happened in the dream. I come up with a lot of ideas from dreams. In the dream they were more like hieroglyphics, but they were like, these big foam letters, and people were doing this dance around them. In the dream it was more like this white office space with all these coloured lights…I sort of wanted it to almost look like this weird blurry memory in the back of your mind.
The next VIDEODOME will be at Lucky 13 Saloon in Brooklyn on Monday, March 17. If you can’t make it in person but would still like to contribute to a good cause, the Patreon is here.
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