Wanted to know, Which signs, The exact points,
To coordinate, Cradle to grave, It’s how desire works.
There is a hole Inside your soul, Way way down,
To be recognized, Oh that’s where behavior comes from
In the City of Angels, where boulevards hum with longing and every corner shop window once promised rebellion, Band Aparte have returned with a single that feels at once familiar and feverish. Their latest track, (What A) Drag, moves with angular insistence, a rhythm that urges hips forward while the mind reels back into doubt. Released on September 26th, it arrives as the first dispatch from their forthcoming self-titled record, due out on November 22nd.
Brian Mendoza, the band’s singer and original architect, still threads the needle between poetry and provocation. He is joined by Ryan Fairchild on guitar, Adryan Mardesich on bass, and Micah Olsen on drums. Together, they construct a song that seizes the language of advertising, twisting it into a mirror held against the modern self.
The single makes clear its subject: the selling of identity. Consumer culture is laid bare, each verse exposing its promises of perfection, its whispered sales pitch for rebellion itself. As Mendoza chants, “Advertise advertise / Make yourself just right,” the words carry both command and lament. What was once insurgent becomes branded, what was once anguish is now merchandised. Even depression is hawked like a seasonal discount, “half off on dying.”
The track’s drive, sharp and restless, recalls the sudden lurch of thought one feels under constant advertising. The accompanying video, filmed and edited by Mendoza himself, takes place in the shopping mall: an arena some declare obsolete, yet one that continues to shout instructions through tinny PA systems and lite music.
It’s a setting heavy with irony. The punk rock mecca Retail Slut has long been shuttered in Hollywood, while high-end consumer temples like The Grove endure as LA’s gleaming shrines to capitalism. Mendoza’s camera glides past storefronts and corridors, revealing advertisements that dictate not merely what to wear but how to live, how to be. The stark frames recall John Carpenter’s They Live, where truth is suddenly legible if only one dares to look.
Band Aparte have long been a presence in the city’s shadows, since their 2016 debut Memory on Trial, through a string of EPs and LPs. With (What A) Drag, they step again into the glare, dissecting desire with a dance beat. The song captures the strange romance of modern existence: the endless urge to consume, the endless urge to be seen, and the empty chamber where those urges meet. It is there, in that hollow, that Band Aparte make their stand.
Watch the video for “(What A) Drag” below:
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Band Aparte have long been a presence in the city’s shadows, since their 2016 debut Memory on Trial, through a string of EPs and LPs. With (What A) Drag, they step again into the glare, dissecting desire with a dance beat. The song captures the strange romance of modern existence: the endless urge to consume, the endless urge to be seen, and the empty chamber where those urges meet. It is there, in that hollow, that Band Aparte make their stand.
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