“Plastic Future” (A Place To Bury Strangers song)

A Place To Bury Strangers, photo by Ebry Yildiz

A Place To Bury Strangers isn’t a band one often associates with social commentary yet those ideas have long been in the music cast often in terms more personal. But “Plastic Future” and especially with the music video directed and edited by Dylan Mars Greenberg the words and visuals point to how in life as we’ve been having to live it if we’re even trying to keep up with the way things are in a functional way our attention is pulled in all directions and our time and energy segmented and chiseled off of us in a way and we can feel atomized by this thing that at one time might be described as “the future” but is really just an overly marketed and imposed way of being and living no one really asked for and which encourages us to abandon normal, analog humanity in pursuit of what? Elusive and ephemeral rewards in the world of social media? Jobs that demand all and give little while under the distant boot of some tech oligarch and their trickle down control or every moment of your life? The shock and awe and outage cycle of modern politics as fascism rises against feckless “opposition” and undermined institutions? It’s all a lot and it can overwhelm you. But in the line “I won’t let love go/As I let go of the future” Oliver Ackermann has identified that a central hope lies in our essential humanity and the capacity to feel something more appealing and powerful than fear, hatred, greed, anxiety and despair. Musically it’s a bit different with the emphasis on the rhythms and less so on the divinely noisy and scorching guitar work that has been the hallmark of the group’s sound but it’s latest album Synthesizer (2024) isn’t short on new directions for A Place To Bury Strangers. Watch the video for “Plastic Future” on YouTube and follow the new york band at the links below.