While live shows are effectively throttled in-person, it has become more important than ever for bands to come up with ways to maintain visibility on their fans’ radar. One such way? By releasing music videos. Once largely considered a necessary evil (albeit a potentially fun and creative one) to help boost album sales, videos are now placed as events in themselves, providing a way for fans to stay engaged with the bands.
Little Village is honored to be able to help with that effort today with the debut of Cedar Falls glam punkers The Hex Girls’ video for their newest single “Cats With No Teeth (Catch No Mice).” Presented like a refugee from the horror section of Blockbuster Video in the 1990s, the video follows the bloody progress of lead singer Nick Fisher as he becomes the embodiment of the darkest fears of the QAnon faithful.
Though not specifically related, stylistically, the video picks up where the band’s last video “City of Rain” left off — the worn VHS patina, the masks.
“[It’s] definitely a call back to ‘City of Rain,’ but also a reflection of the animalistic themes in “Cats With No Teeth” and the rest of this next album (an EP titled Pop Fluff which will drop after the first of the year),” Fisher explains in email, “as well as a nod to the COVID times we’re living in. The band, extras, and the film crew were all wearing masks of some sort on set and in most of the scenes nearly 100% of the time while filming.”
“As we were writing the video, we delved into the bonkers conspiracy theories out there surrounding COVID with the goal of satirizing them in some form in the video,” he continued. “We ended up incorporating adrenochrome, an element of the QAnon conspiracy, and that yielded those crazy ritual sacrifice scenes. It takes the notion which QAnon folks subscribe to — that the ‘Liberal Elite’ is sacrificing children to harvest some age-defying drug — and turns it on its head. The protagonist (intentionally dressed in red, white and blue) sacrifices the conspiracy peddlers who picked a fight with him. It seemed like a niche reference when we decided to shoot it back in July, but now we’re seeing near-daily headlines about this stuff. Serendipitous.”
Even with the seemingly heady concept for the video, it does a great job of capturing the darker theme of the song while also keeping with the bouncing rhythm and humor. If the band’s last album had a glammy Spiders From Mars vibe, “Cats With No Teeth” seems to have matured in its inspirations to a Thin White Duke era, with its horns and backbeat.
The band is planning on creating more videos for the upcoming EP; Fisher says the goal is to do videos for all six of the songs.
“All the ‘normal’ rules for promoting your album have been thrown out the window now, and this is where we are putting our creative resources,” he said. “To keep upping the ante on our video concepts.”
I’ll certainly be keeping a socially-distant eye out for the videos and the pre-order for that EP when it comes.
