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Sep 22, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Deerhoof are releasing a new album, Actually, You Can, on October 22 via Joyful Noise. Now they have shared its third single, “Scarcity is Manufactured,” via an animated video. The song is inspired by the music of 1950s singer/guitarist Ritchie Valens, who died tragically in a plane crash in 1959 at age 17 (fellow musicians Buddy Holly and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson were also on the tragic flight). Gabriella Molina directed the video. Watch it below.

“Every note I play is Mexican music,” Deerhoof’s guitarist Ed Rodgriguez says in a press release. “This song is a celebration of the community who gave me the confidence to say that out loud, and it’s a call to support each other in embracing our true selves.”

Rodgriguez continues: “The anthem’s spirit comes from Ritchie Valens’ rendition of the traditional song ‘La Bamba.’ I was moved by his declaration of Mexican pride and that he did it in his own style. He was able to be his past, present and future, everything at once. I’ve struggled with my identity, being raised by parents who embodied their culture yet pushed me to be more American, hoping to shield me from the racism they endured. I never felt like a ‘real’ Mexican but I also wasn’t seen as a ‘real’ American by many. At our shows, people began to tell me it meant a lot to them that there was someone of Mexican descent playing in Deerhoof. Community gives us the strength to accept and celebrate ourselves in a way that we may not be able to on our own.”

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

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