If you find it hard to wake up
My clock says now or never
We’ve got shackles to sever
There’s no way to sit this one out
The 24 hour news machine hums like a broken organ, droning through every room, its light too white, its cadence too calm for the ruin it relays. The anchors speak with a practiced tremor: half comfort, half command, while the screens behind them bloom with fresh disaster. In a land increasingly without compass or conscience, where fear has replaced faith and governance plummets toward neglect, the spectacle rules. Each headline is an incantation, each pause a cue to gasp. The nation sits transfixed in its blue glow, murmuring the same dull prayer: uh oh, what’s next? And the networks answer, again and again, with something worse.
In No Country, New York City’s MIDNIGHTCHOIR issues a dispatch from the collapsing center of empire. The track moves with the urgency of a protest march at midnight: measured, determined, and quaking within. The duo of Patrick Bobilin and Sarah Simon builds their revolt with rhythm: every beat feels like a verdict; every lyric, a reminder that complacency has a body count.
No Country’s pulse recalls the austere machinery of disco stripped of decadence, rebuilt for resistance. There is no mirage of escape, however. “There’s no country I call home,” Bobilin declares, with the clarity of one who has outlived patriotism. His voice, part lament, part call to arms, cuts through Ben Greenberg’s production like sirens over a silent valley at four in the morning. Together, they forge a sound for collective endurance in the ruins of late capitalism.
The accompanying video extends the argument through satire. Styled as a farcical broadcast from a collapsing society, it captures the absurd theatre of modern media and its ability to document catastrophe while remaining oblivious to it. Simon and Bobilin, in their roles as anchor and correspondent, perform a grim pantomime of professionalism as the set quite literally falls apart. Superstorms roar, riots erupt, and the signal persists. It is a comedy of apocalypse: the newsroom as mausoleum. 12090 A.D.’s Anna Copa Cabanna puts on a splendid performance, at once grotesque and human, embodying the dual nature of the crisis.
The duo’s reference points: Robocop, They Live, and the blunt absurdity of Sabotage-era Beastie Boys, are not nostalgic ornaments but ideological tools. The message is simple and severe: the spectacle cannot save you. MIDNIGHTCHOIR’s gallows humour seeks confrontation.
Politically, No Country refuses the romance of conforming to a status quo. It confronts nationalism as a hollow inheritance, and instead calls for solidarity born of necessity. “It’s time to get them together,” they sing, an appeal for mutual action before collapse becomes habit. This is protest music for a generation fluent in irony, yet starved for meaning.
Watch the video for “No Country” below:
Since 2023, MIDNIGHTCHOIR have written from within the storm. Their forthcoming album Debtors Disco continues this inquiry, tracing a line from debt to devotion, from satire to survival. No Country stands as its manifesto: a cold dance against the warm lie of neutrality. In a world where the walls are already cracking, MIDNIGHTCHOIR provide the rhythm for tearing them down.
Debtors Disco hits all DSPs on November 6th, celebrated with an album release show at Alphaville, Brooklyn, featuring None Shall Remain, 12090 A.D., and DJ Alex English.
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