Pretty Bleak are serving up some of the best pop-punk tunes around. Their latest single “other people’s heads” is an absolute belter with some really insightful lyrics about the influence of social media on modern society.
“Just before the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about the fact that if you have a social media account, at any given moment someone could be creating a model of your personality in their minds that you have very little influence over,” explained vocalist Sam Thomas. “In the past it would have been quite unusual to meet someone for the first time and discover that they already know significant and intimate things about you … I wanted to describe both the uneasiness that an individual might feel about being in a situation comparable to that, and the absurdness of the fact that this paradigm has become the expected state of our social interactions.”
This smart song is matched with a really clever film clip directed by Tom Thomas.
“The use of mirrors and cameras constantly reflecting and perceiving us throughout the video represents obsession our society has with the perceptions of those around us, and how this pathology is exaggerated by how prevalent social media is in our lives,” Sam added. “As with all of our videos, we like to intersperse visual metaphors with intense performance shots that mirror the content of the lyrics of our songs, because we like the video to act as a coherent augmentation of the song itself.”
Pretty Bleak will celebrate the release of “other people’s heads at Stay Gold in Naarm/Melbourne on November 25. They’re also heading to Great Escape in Lutruwita/Tasmania on March 3.
Image used with permission from Habit Music Co.; credit: Tom Thomas