Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by John Richards, host of the Morning Show on KEXP, is "Department of Blood" by Activity, from the 2023 album Spirit in the Room on Western Vinyl.
The latest LP from Brooklyn band Activity — titled Spirit in the Room — is appropriately "haunting." Songs take inspiration from the loss of vocalist/mutli-instrumentalist Travis Johnson's mother to pancreatic cancer, including today's Song of the Day.
“The grief was (and sometimes is) this colossal thing,” he shares in a press statement, “and I kept finding myself thinking of how I could find her or get in touch with her, like there was a phone number or address and I just had to find it.”
As he explains to Flood Magazine, “Department of Blood" tackles these frustrations, “the feeling of knowing you’re being manipulated by something way more powerful than you and also knowing you can do absolutely nothing about it. Just that resignation. It seemed to work.”
The accompanying music video (which you can watch below) carries the theme. “I was working in a dank, cold parking garage in the middle of winter on a mysterious electronics project that I’m not supposed to talk about, and still don’t really understand. It was freezing in there and I was also having the worst anxiety and depression I’d had in my adult life, so I felt insane every day. In the trash there, I found these little miniature figures and started taking these grotesque closeups of them.”
