Dublin, Ireland-based alternative rock band Late Night Pharmacy release a new single entitled “Slacktivist (Normalise This)” today (June 11th). It is the band’s second single of 2021, following April’s “Too Late for the Rickshaws”. Recording the single was only possible due to the generous financial of the Department of Culture, who last year announced the creation of a Music Industry Stimulus Package (MISP), intended to help keep the Irish commercial music sector afloat during Covid-19. In November 2020, Late Night Pharmacy were awarded funding under the MISP, and hired Aidan Cunningham (Wheatus, The Scratch, Nealo, Overhead the Albatross) to produce and mix three singles.
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In Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, he described how journalists use clichéd, shopworn phrases to write sentences almost unconsciously (“They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you”), hence psychologically protecting them from considering the full implications of their opinions. 1984 features a character who speaks so orthodoxically as to resemble an automaton: “It was not the man’s brain that was speaking, it was his larynx.”
Today, most communication originates not in the brain, but in the thumbs: social media discourse is an endless deluge of the same handful of clichéd expressions repeated ad nauseum, and conveying no real sentiment other than smug condescension. In this environment, even the crudest artificial intelligence could the Turing test with ease. As a commentary on this trend, the lyrics of “Slacktivist (Normalise This)” are entirely made up of overused social media expressions, assembled in no particular order as a series of empty, vapid non sequiturs.
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Musically, “Slacktivist (Normalise This)” is a heavy alt-rock song which draws influence from Refused and Kasabian. It is based around a recurring distorted riff which builds into an anthemic chorus, before a series of jarring time signature changes and tempo shifts. To emphasize the theme of the song, the band used deepfake technology to mimic their lead vocalist’s voice, which was then blended with his real voice to create a robotic, purposefully artificial effect. Pad synths, noisy sound effects and distorted vocal samples are layered on top of the basic instrumentation to create a creepy, ominous vibe.
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