Early this month, New Jersey’s Titus Andronicus announced a new album titled An Obelisk due for release on June 21 via Merge Records. Less than a year and a half after the release of their last album, A Productive Cough, the record sees the band returning to the rollicking punk they made their name on. Our Song of the Day is the record’s lead single, “(I Blame) Society,” which frontman Patrick Stickles explains like this:
The ideology of "punk" supports the elevation of our own interior authority and the degradation of exterior authority, which we recognize to be arbitrary, a tool by which the many are subjugated under the few. While the common ‘punk rocker’ will take this as license to piss on the street and generally pursue a lifestyle of nihilistic hedonism, the true ‘punk’ will recognize the price of this freedom. An Obelisk tells the story of one particular individual, someone maybe a lot like you but certainly a lot like me, scouring linty pockets, trying to pay that bill.
An Obelisk was produced by Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould and recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio studio in Chicago over six days. Watch the lyric video for “(I Blame) Society,” directed by Ray Concepcion and shot in front of a particularly recognizable obelisk, the Washington Monument, below.
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