“Influencer” (New Wolves song) – Queen City Sounds and Art

NewWolves2_crop — New Wolves, photo courtesy the artist

The music video for New Wolves’ new single “Influencer” gives now obvious clues about whether the song is a commentary on the socio-cultural phenomenon of the “influencer.” It’s a series of adventures in collage and it introduces an ever-changing array of imagery interacting and evolving before returning to an early image of a bird humanoid stepping out of the fray of the jungle of messaging and visuals that it had stepped into and strolled through. The chill pop song with nicely subtle textures and an incandescent synth line has lyrics more than hinting at the pressures involved with being an influencer and the constant need to provide content and preferably from one’s own life so that one turns one’s individual experiences and preferences into a commodity to present and to be consumed on the regular. Without explicitly saying so, New Wolves perhaps suggest that that is, on some level, the nature of social media entirely in which we present a mediated experience all the time in a way we did not before its existence. In the song’s soothing yet melancholic town we hear some empathy for the state of things but also a yearning to escape and even entirely derail the process of making out psyches a consumer product to be monetized by corporations. Watch the video on YouTube and follow New Wolves at the links provided.