Bay Area indie-punk band Shutups are proud to share the music video for “Televised Hit & Run”, the second single from their forthcoming album, I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit. Driven by a propulsive krautrock rhythm with Moog sub bass and gang vocals that soar over distorted punk riffs, the track is one of the most aggressive cuts on the LP – while still highlighting the power-pop melodies that tie all of the band’s wild ideas together. I can’t eat nearly as much as I want to vomit was mixed and mastered by Grammy nominated engineer / producer Jack Shirley (Deafheaven, Jeff Rosenstock, King Woman), and will be released via Kill Rock Stars on October 21st, 2022. You can listen to the new single below:

The release of “Televised Hit & Run” is accompanied by an appropriately bugnuts music video for the high-energy rager. Created by Shutups guitarist/synth player Eric Stafford using 3D rendering and VR technology, the band recorded their movements as they mimed performing the song in a virtual space and then mapped photos onto these crude digital avatars to create uncanny valley representations of the band members (an impressive one-up from the band’s previous green screen video for “NSA (Corporate Holidays)”). 

Describing the inspiration behind the video, Stafford says, “I wanted to keep up our music video trend of framing the band in an unnatural context. Treating the band as puppets of their own music is funny to me and the most interesting way to accomplish this was to actually create real-time video-game scenes of the band (and NPC fans) endlessly pantomiming along with the titular single. Using a VR headset to capture the performers in their PS2 purgatory is the icing on the metaphorical cake.” Eric cleverly turns what could have been a typical and run-of-the-mill “band performing the song in the studio” music video into a madcap visual representation of the Shutups sense of humor – looking like a demented game of The Sims or the gloriously dated CGI graphics from Peter Gabriel’s Steam music video from the 90s.

As the song and video both reach a climax, the digital avatars of the band suddenly drop to the floor one by one, before respawning in an empty black void where they are twerking and t-posing in unison to a nasty breakdown. Describing this particular section of the song, Hadley says that “The ending breakdown pattern was written by one of my oldest friends, Will Jenkins during our high school post-hardcore/screamo days. It was never used in any bands, but we used it as a musical joke whenever we could. It was inserted into at least one high school jazz band performance and definitely a few times during a worship band set, as we grew up playing in the church band.”

Photo Courtesy: Kristy Benjamin