• News

• All

Aug 24, 2021 By Mark Redfern Photography by Jess Joy

Deerhoof are releasing a new album, Actually, You Can, on October 22 via Joyful Noise. Now they have shared its second single, “Plant Thief,” via an animated video. Molly Fairhurst directed the video. Watch it below.

In a press release Fairhurst says the video is “about a very angry girl. Sometimes when you are hurt, so much you could dissolve into ink, nothing can stop your shaking atoms other than being swallowed whole into the dark. Sometimes a giant bird will be there, just in time to do that. Satomi’s verse penned a story in my head and I let the thrashing guitars and drums carry me away over the spikes and deep falls. Pulling and falling and tripping I did what I could to match the musical tensions.”

Previously Deerhoof shared the album’s first single, “Department of Corrections,” via an amusing stop-motion animated video.

Actually, You Can is the eighteenth album from “the prolific Earth-based band,” as a previous press release described them (as opposed to all those great bands from Jupiter and Venus we’ve been writing about recently). The press release said Actually, You Can finds Deerhoof “using their agility, wit, and outlandishness to create a new shared language of revolution, one powered by lyrical labyrinths and thrashing melodies.” Sounds about par for the course for a Deerhoof album then. The album was also described as a “grand return to biblical references ironically set to frenzied noise rock, as heard on their breakthrough series of LPs, Reveille, Apple O’, and The Runners Four.”

The band (Satomi Matsuzaki, Ed Rodriguez, John Dieterich, and Greg Saunier) produced the album themselves. They collectively had this to say about it in the previous press release: “Think of all the beauty, positivity, and love that gets deemed ugly, negative and hateful by the self-proclaimed guardians of ‘common sense.’ We’d hardly be destroying society by dismantling their colonial economics and prisons and gender roles and aesthetics. We’d be creating it!”

In 2020 Deerhoof had several releases, including their last regular studio album (Future Teenage Cave Artists), a live album (To Be Surrounded By Beautiful, Curious, Breathing, Laughing Flesh Is Enough), and an ambitious covers album that featured 43 songs in only 35 minutes and was a free download (Love-Lore).

Read our 2020 interview with the band.

Support Under the Radar on Patreon.