The Onion Rats Seethe With the Frustration and Rage at the Destructive Power of the Austerity Consensus of the Powers That Be on “Choke”

The Onion Rats wrote “Choke” in 2020 when the pandemic was new and civil unrest over a variety of issues was ambient but one branch of that really got the spotlight when the protests around the murder of George Floyd by police flared far and wide. You can hear the frustration and rage in the song and at times the words flow in distorted bursts but the contorted sonic pathways of the song contain the acute awareness felt by most people who aren’t rich that the powers that be whether in the economic of political elite cared more for maintaining the regular flow of markets at any cost and a return to the illusion and delusion of “normal” as soon as possible however that needed to be rationalized and often plenty of people rationalized that to themselves in the name of the fiction of self-perceived and false notions of liberty and freedom. But you hear none of that foolishness in this song. It is imbued with the simmering anger at a social and economic order that treats most people as expendable and unimportant. In its darkly psychedelic nightmare harmonies there is that persistent awareness that the world as it is is propped up by a contingent reality that is dependent on an austerity consensus we could snap out of and topple late capitalism if we wanted to, if there was the will to do so. Listen to “Choke” on Spotify and follow The Onion Rats on Instagram.