Leeds post-punk revival and alternative rock heroes I LIKE TRAINS have returned with their new single “The Truth”, the biting and hypnotically caustic first track taken from the forthcoming new record “KOMPROMAT”, the band’s first studio album in eight years.
The record deals with our consumption of information in the digital age, and how can we possibly make any sense of the many narratives being shoveled our way in an onslaught of constant and targeted bombardment via feed.
First single “The Truth” cuts through the spin to the very heart and soul of the matter:
“This was one of the final tracks to come together for the album,” vocalist David Martin explains. “It came from a list I was keeping over a number of months. I would follow the news and social media and add a line or two a day, so that it ended up plotting the news cycle over that period. The amount of information we’re fed on a daily basis is enormous. Everyone is so keen to “break” the news as quickly as possible, that it becomes impossible to comprehend it, and draw a meaningful narrative through it. How does this event connect to that one? Who gains what because this happened? Who is missing out? It’s exhausting.”
“The Truth” is accompanied by a deep-fake karaoke video directed by previous co-conspirator Michael Connolly – a Leeds born artist and designer.
“The track is relentless and I wanted the film to feel the same. Claustrophobia and confusion were my watch words” he comments. “I wanted the film to go beyond the standard music video ‘archive footage’ edit. I combined deepfakes, distorted visuals, and digital découpé techniques to create an intense level of disorientation. I feel this really gives the film it’s own weird paranoid trippy nightmare world – it sums up the last four years in geopolitics pretty well for me.”
Brush up on your Russian, and sing-along to the video below:
Kompromat, (In Russian culture, short for “compromising material”), is a record exploring the rise of populism through the kind divide and conquer propaganda that led to Brexit in the UK, to the bewildering ascent of Trump in America.
“An I LIKE TRAINS record doesn’t really start to take shape until there’s a theme”, says the group’s vocalist and lyricist David Martin. “That point came following Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks in 2013.”
On the post-truth world, we are currently mired in, and the manipulation of people through digital data, and Martin continues:
“We didn’t set out to write a record about current affairs, but the path we set out on converged drastically with that daily discourse. The album inadvertently became about populist politics across the world. Brexit, Trump, Cambridge Analytica and covert Russian influence ended up at the centre of it all” Martin says.
KOMPROMAT will be released on August 21st via Schubert Music’s newly founded Atlantic Curve. The band will discuss the record live with journalist Simon Catling this Saturday, May 9th at 20:30 BST via their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages.
Featured photo by Ben Bentley
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