PREMIERE // The City Hall – Dirt
Post by Misha
The video for The City Hall‘s poignant new single, Dirt, plays out in the 8-bit world of Cruisin’ USA. A red sports car speeds through the Sedona desert at irresponsible speeds, dodging oncoming farm vehicles and skirting around school busses. After completing the race, the car is inexplicably transported to the moon.
Bandmates Luke Hogfoss and Casey Dunau say that they wanted to create a series of videos based on old-school video games for all the singles off their forthcoming album, Real Nice & Hurtful (you can watch the video for their first single, Post, here), but the video concept works particularly well for Dirt. The juxtaposition of a mindless game divorced from consequences or reality, and the song’s gritty subject – a man stuck in a loop of succumbing to addiction and being artificially saved only to fall again and again – is chillingly apropos.
Luke says he wrote the song after witnessing a family member struggle with addiction. The band hopes the song will spark conversations around the worsening opioid crisis and the woefully insufficient resources that exist for those affected. But ultimately, he says, “it’s just a story of someone struggling against themselves.”
And in that sense, whatever its real life inspiration, the song is all too relatable. It speaks to a certain numbness that we all fight, the sense that no matter what we do or say, nothing changes. The game just starts over, or we find ourselves floating alone on the moon.
The City Hall call their music “the sonic equivalent of throwing gushers, broken camcorders, and birthday tears into an ez-bake oven—in other words, sugary pop with a salty aftertaste.” The Seattle-based duo is gearing up to release their debut full length, Real Nice & Hurtful, and folks I have to say, I’ve heard the whole thing and I am *deeply* into it. Keep these dudes on yr radar (find them on Twitter and Insta) and please go support them on Bandcamp or at one of their upcoming Seattle shows:
March 2 – Seattle, WA – High Dive
March 31 – Seattle, WA – Victory Lounge
May 11 – Seattle, WA – Black Lodge