Distorted beat

Video premiere: The Vacant Lots return with new track ‘Amnesia’
By Alex James Taylor | Music | 17 July 2023

Before Alan Vega sadly passed away in 2016, Jared Artaud of Brooklyn duo The Vacant Lots visited the Suicide frontman’s Manhattan apartment and left with the collaborative track, Suicide Note. Vega-endorsed, the duo’s hypnotic, pulsing beats clearly appealed to the Suicide man’s sonic impulses, whose vocals on the track are a dazzling reminder of his brilliance, right until the very end.

Now, The Vacant Lots – Artaud and Brian MacFadyen – return with their fifth studio record, Interiors, and lead single Amnesia – we premiere the accompanying visuals here. “It’s about dealing with duality and integrating the conflicting feelings within a relationship,” says Artaud of the track. “It’s about feeling dissociative and getting burned by the fire. Then coping with how this inevitably leads to the dissolution of the relationship.”

Amnesia‘s sound echoes this narrative, a brooding ode to love lost and lashed. Visceral as ever, an aura of heaviness dances to tense, twitchy synth that pulls you in, pulls you under, as the accompanying video, created by Alex Schipper, translates the track through a crackling black and white visual portrait starring model Mateen Ismail.

“A mantra for the band is ‘through darkness, light.’”

Self-produced, the band’s upcoming record, Interiors, is a work of necessity according to Artaud: “Sometimes it feels like the world is going to end soon, so I want to get all of this out of my system while I can. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a race against time.” The album is out 13th October via Fuzz Club.

Pre-order The Vacant Lots Interiors here.

Photography by Chris Hogge


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