This is my generation
The generation to come
My generation’s so dumb
I got to work…I got to work it out
Toronto’s Odonis Odonis are two guys who’ve been living on deadlines, invoices, and the kind of exhaustion you can’t quite shake, the kind that leaves your bones humming. Their latest single, Work It Out, feels torn from the real lives of people getting squeezed by the age of AI quick-fixes, ballooning bills, and a marketplace built on vapour. This is not mere abstraction to these musicians…it’s day-to-day triage. Dean Tzenos and Denholm Whale scrape their art together between gigs, edits, childcare, and the quiet terror of watching decades of skill threatened by servers and scripts. Whale books shows with the desperation of somebody who knows the whole house of cards might blow apart on any given Tuesday. Every note they put down arrives shivering with that pressure.
The track opens like a busted door hinge an abrupt rush of wires and warning, as clanging guitars collide with fervent layered vocals, a bassline that penetrates the marrow, and a drum beat that pounds like a nervous pulse. No fat, no filler, just the harsh churn of living under late-capitalist roulette. The song circles despair, painting a world fractured by greed and division, yet reaching toward connection. There are vows broken, faith eroded, and desire strained, but beneath the turmoil lies a raw insistence on love, on unity, on survival against the encroaching dark.
Then the words hit. The lyrics chart a collapse of direction and self-control, swinging between generational disillusionment, numbed submission, and the frantic need to “work” through inner turmoil. They capture a speaker caught in cycles of self-destruction and forced resilience, wrestling with desire, burnout, and the sense of an inevitable personal unraveling that keeps echoing like a grim refrain. It’s catharsis delivered like a blunt instrument; a mantra of someone pushing through another impossible morning.
Tzenos doesn’t hide behind metaphor when talking about it. “Inspired by the loss of my 18 year career in animation, the song pairs dark urgency with humour,” he says. “For the first time, I used AI creatively to make an AI slop video that reclaims the very force that cost me my livelihood, turning disruption into art. ‘The next creative revolution won’t be aesthetic, it will be ethical.”
The video pushes the whole thing into another dimension: a modern-day Dadaist concept that is grotesque and disturbing, somewhere in a horror space between the Brothers Quay, Hieronymus Bosch, an Otto Dix painting, and Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy. Directed and edited by Constantin Tzenos, it doesn’t illustrate the song so much as mutter back at it with warped faces and twitching forms: the kind of fevered imagery that feels scraped off the underside of contemporary life.
Work It Out is testimony from the trenches, spat through clenched teeth, wired with panic and persistence. A track built for the people who wake up every day to systems that don’t care whether they make it through the month…yet from the outset, they keep calm, and carry on.
Watch below:
Listen to Work It Out below and order Odonis Odonis, out now via Royal Mountain Records, here.
Follow Odonis Odonis:
Or via: