KAL MARKS SHARE "WASTELAND BABY" VIA FLOOD MAGAZINE

Posted on September 5th, 2024

[as seen on FLOOD]

Did you know that that song from those Hershey’s commercials about stopping the world and melting with you is actually about nuclear holocaust? It’s hard to conceive of now, but evidently the Cold War had become so normalized by 1982 that we were getting chart-topping, upbeat new wave singles casually romanticizing the long-feared climax of The Day After and Fail Safe and Miracle Mile and Threads and countless other beyond-bleak depictions of what seemingly felt inevitable throughout a large chunk of the 20th century.

Anyway, this is all to say that Brooklyn-via-Boston’s Kal Marks are harnessing Modern English’s sense of optimism all these near-realized global disasters later with their latest LP, Wasteland Baby. On the record’s newly released title track, this culminates in what almost feels like a return to the ’60s girl-group era of pop songwriting under its tough, grungy exterior as Carl Shane spins a love song to his wife out of the wreckage of COVID, late-capitalism, any number of global conflicts our country may or may not be lubricating, and the increased pace of climate change that’s resulted from them. “‘Wasteland Baby’ is an apocalyptic love song, and really it’s an ode to my wife—she and our family make this often-miserable world worth living in, and I’m so lucky to have that,” Shane shares of the track, noting that the lyrics take cues from the morose wit of The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt. “This is my favorite Kal Marks song and it’s definitely the most proud I’ve ever been about a set of lyrics.”

The track’s video, directed by Austin Morris, dramatically animates Shane’s lyrics with imagery familiar to Blade Runner, Mad Max, and really any sci-fi-horror genre film that revolves around its deeply unsettling humanoid ETs. “‘Wasteland Baby’ is already a visual song, so the imagery came naturally,” notes Morris. “The song’s pacing felt like a heist film with a firework finale, a last desperate attempt in a dead world. To me, this is a very sincere song—it’s talking about love and it’s talking about it honestly. I wanted to make sure the video was as simple as that. I used 3D models in Blender to create the video, as the program is great for sci-fi world-building and the ability to achieve that creative scale. This was my first attempt at this method of animation.”

Check out the animated clip below, and pre-order Wasteland Baby here.