Last month, Nothing announced Dance On The Blacktop, the Philadelphia shoegaze outfit’s follow-up to 2016’s Tired of Tomorrow. We previously heard the lead single, “Zero Day”, and now the band has shared a new song called “Blue Line Baby”.
While not as heavy as its predecessor, the track packs a gut punch of a chorus, with a wash of enveloping distortion cloaking frontman Domenic Palermo’s mournful, atmospheric vocals. The accompanying clip, which was dreamt up by Palermo and members of the Klip Collective, is a stark, visually sumptuous fairytale, with a press release describing it as telling the story “of the Kensington/Frankford section of North Philadelphia in the early 1990’s, amidst its full blown opioid outbreak, using street names and landmarks as the stories protagonists.”
“Looking around at the friends and family that are still around that came from down there, I’ll always be touched by what can come out of all that chaos and suffering,” Palermo said. “Children forced to learn loss early, faced with immeasurable odds and all the while this train continually hovers over your head, taunting you with its irony that there wasn’t a way out.”
The video, which you can watch here, is available only to Apple Music subscribers, but you can stream the song below.
Dance On the Blacktop is due out on August 24th, and will be followed by a massive world tour. See the band’s live itinerary here.
