Favourites here at the southern outpost of Backseat Mafia, A. Swayze & The Ghosts are back with a renewed fervor following their come back single earlier this year ‘Cool Cucumber’. ‘He Is Dead’ confirms that the band’s palette is filled with many colours as they explore new territories beyond their punk origins – a dash of new wave post punk pizazz layered on top of a dead pan delivery and threaded with a sense of humour.
The band has a swagger, a confidence and an attitude – the song is a cathartic blast of studied cool.
‘He Is Dead’ wrestles with ideas of false idols, consumerism, a fear of the future and questioning ideals held in the past. While writing ‘He Is Dead’ the band’s frontman Andrew Swayze abandoned his previous self-described habit of overthinking, signifying a newfound lyrical freedom that echoes the ethos of recent “Bowie-punk” offering ‘Cool Cucumber’. Swayze says of the single:
The lyrics for ‘He Is Dead’ came to me like a bolt from the heavens. I was playing around with a loop I made from one of Ben’s demos that had a guitar progression on top of a LinnDrum groove. I hit record and the entire first verse came out immediately – that’s often how I write lyrics: ad-lib and allow whatever melodies and words bubble out of my subconscious. It’s only recently that I’ve allowed myself to keep them rather than overthink it. Interestingly, I’ve found that the meaning of these ramblings often becomes apparent later on in the process. There’s something mystical about that to me.”
Swayze is an enigmatic performer – mesmerising in his commitment and stage presence – and his delivery is, as ever, studied and observant, distant and poised as his vocals coasts across the wall of blazing buzz-saw instruments and – let’s be honest – indelible pop melodies.
The accompanying video, starring Cora the dog was filmed and edited by Swayze and is a surreal performance of a pooch with an animated tongue on a TV watched by the band like some episode of Goggle-box. Swayze says:
We shot the music video in a couple of hours before we had to arrive at a soundcheck. It was still light out, so we had to board up every window in my rental, and Cora kept wandering into the shots as we filmed ourselves watching television. The process was actually quite meditative: sitting in silence watching the same nonsense scenes over and over. I suppose that’s exactly what a lot of us spend our time doing throughout our lives, but without the meditation and without noticing.
This video perfectly encapsulates the band’s insouciant attitude laced with a sense of absurdism:
The single (available now through all the usual download and streaming sites here) heralds news of the band’s hotly anticipated second album, ‘Let’s Live a Life Better Than This’, due out on 25 October 2024. Four years in the making, the guitar-led, dance-forward record was written between Naarm/Melbourne & secluded spots across lutruwita/Tasmania and recorded at Sunset Pig Studios, self-produced in a first for the band and mixed by Andy Savours (Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Rina Sawayama, Arctic Monkeys) with Swayze tracking the bulk of his vocals in his spare toilet/DIY soundbooth.
You can pre-order the album here.
Feature Photograph: Rick Clifford
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