Strange Men – Queen City Sounds and Art

Strange Men Subvert Prevailing Paradigms of Normality on Fuzzy Garage Punk Single “Do What the Boys Do”

Strange Men’s single “Do What the Boys Do” was written amidst a mental health and overdose epidemic and its splintered guitar buzz is the perfect embodiment of fractured and fraught emotions, psyches and lives but also as a mirror image of the more tranquil passages. And the rest of the song with the melodic vocals transitioning to those more desperate and feral trace a path that seems to be a part of daily life in the world now. The all too common cultural narrative of the fiction that the truly valid people have it all together and anyone experiencing a breakdown of any aspect of their life is probably a degenerate and worthy of judgment or pity at best and persecution and deprivation at worst is discarded here. Strange Men’s song rages against this mindset with compassion and a raw honesty fusing fuzzy garage rock and punk spirit. The music video is too a subversion of aesthetics. Co-directors George S. Rosenthal and Panda Duke (aka Kyle Casey Chu) attemped to shot and edit live in a single take with the band running between marks while eight cameras were running. The footage was slowed down and fed into AI programs to simulate missing frames and upend the usual use of the technology to create something intentionally unsettling and surreal. It is a perfect collaboration and synthesis of aesthetics and concept. Watch the video for “Do What the Boys Do” on YouTube and follow Strange Men at the links below.

Strange Men on Instagram

Strange Men’s Haunted Music Video for “Hot Nights” is a Concise Catharsis of Noisy Punk

Strange Men is a punk duo comprised of drummer/vocalist Róisín Isner and guitarist/vocalist Ashley Clayton whose splintered, fuzzy outbursts seem to channel the likes of the gloriously feral grunge punk of Babes in Toyland and the stripped down and amplified garage rock of The Bobby Lees. In the video for its single “Hot Nights” directed by Panda Dulce (aka Kyle Casey Chu, co-founder of Drag Story Hour) it looks like Strange Men is performing in haunted shed replete with with a figure like something out of a Japanese ghost movie (possibly Chu) except less menacing the band and more the embodiment of the clashing chords and rapid contrast of introspective and screamed vocals this time out provided by Isner. The song seems to be one of contrasts itself: “Hot days make hot nights/Cold days make cold nights.” And how on hit nights she comes alive as does the band. The lyrics clearly aren’t meant to be linear and more an expression of the primal forces underlying the music. Fans of the likes of Shearing Pinx, Nü Sensae and the aforementioned will get the most out of this song just 86 seconds long that rapid runs through all the essentials of what makes for a great punk song with cool hooks, cathartic vocals and a complete lack of self-indulgent excess. Watch the video for “Hot Nights” on YouTube and follow Strange Men from San Francisco at the links provided.

Strange Men on Instagram