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itoldyouiwouldeatyou - Interview from 2000 Trees 2019


UK indie-punk/emo collective itoldyouiwouldeatyou are delighted to reveal the innovative new video for their latest single ‘Young American’ which is out now on all good digital service providers.

The track is the latest to be taken from the band’s debut album Oh Dearismset for release on 16th November 2018 this year via Alcopop! Records x Failure By Design Records, and will be the follow up to their much-lauded Get Terrified EP.

itoldyouiwouldeatyou will also be supporting Japanese math-rock band Tricot and Berlin art-rockers Art Brut on a handful of very rare UK headline date appearances later this year.

The video was created by long-term collaborators Jess and Oli, aka Clumsy Bodies—an LGTBQIA art collective who work closely with the band on much of their visual output—and utilises screen capture and social media to create an immersive world-within-a-digital-world.

Commenting on the themes behind the video, Jess says: “The video mainly looks at pranks through the lens of kinship: that those who prank together are willing to lay their bodies on their line for the prank, but they all have each others backs during it. There’s also a darker side to pranks that Oli (Clumsy Bodies co-parent) brought up: that pranks—particularly those that do untold physical damage—are acts of public self-harm hidden in plain sight. Kids hurt themselves by accident, and we watch. We let the song narrate this particular aspect.

“I’ve wanted to shoot something purely on screens for a while now, and it seemed to fit Young American. Our lives are curated by social media, so it felt more natural to document this story through these screens. However, we underestimated how demanding this made production, particularly as we wanted all the footage to be real. We often feel cheated by screen replacements in films and tv shows. It’s hard to artificially replicate that blue glow laptop screens bathe our faces in; a glow that feels as natural to see on our cheeks as blushing.”

For authenticity, the pair set up fake Instagram accounts, email accounts, and filmed actual videos both on the wristwatch YouTube account and for horndog (that are all open to the public to watch, if you can find them). The incoming texts and facetime calls were made out of shot so it was all happening live, making screen-recording the video a sort of dance—each closed tab or moment a text would come in was choreographed and rehearsed ad nauseam.

“What I found fun,” continues Jess, “or at least, by my definition of fun—was using Google maps to depict first person perspective. We took the protagonist on a virtual American road trip via google maps, particularly looking at the artifices Americana leaves behind, such as the massive cowboy boots in Texas. There was something distancing about it when contrasted with the actual surroundings the protagonist found themselves in, like a disused football ground in South London. It’s a kind of distance that forces this great divide between what we have, and what we are told we can have. That even on the edge of it, with our arms stretched, we cannot touch. But, exhausted, we leave our arms dangling, willing the gap to close. So, yeah, we’re all Americans now.”

Co-creator Oli adds: “We were also thinking about the resignation we seem to face with rejections, that dreams are crushed in an onslaught of emails in a way that grinds down your drive. We wanted to take the way that people are brought up on competition and counter that with figures that are persevering with belief in each other, openness and support.”

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