In the video for HLLLYH’s “Flex It, Tagger” we are taken back in time to an alternate reality where a punk tagger is adding some color to a rundown, possibly abandoned house. All the while headlong drums and a minimal, spiky guitar melody sketches the soundtrack to come. What the tagger doesn’t know is that someone inside seems to be hacking reality itself. And streaks of color run across the screen over normal existence as various taggers are profiled and hunted down by drones from a retro-futurist version of an authoritarian, technocratic regime as part of “Project Carnivore.” The song is like a more eccentric pop punk but with the same exuberance and ear for melody and exciting rhythms that make that music work. But not to worry, as in real life, things don’t go as planned and the infrastructure that makes the drone strike and persecution malfunctions and waxes itself. The end. It’s an absurd premise straight out of a more ambitious and surreal take end of the movie Hackers (1995) but it has the kind of energy we need now when technology seems to be channeled into the most dystopian, fascist plots to destroy society and the planet and it needs to be subverted by ideas and actions the techbros can’t envision with no small amount of mockery thrown in. Watch the video for “Flex It, Tagger” on YouTube and follow HLLLYH (formerly The Mae Shi) at the links below. The band’s debut album URUBURU released June 27, 2025 via Team Shi.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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