In the tradition of pioneering bands like The Band, or New Order, High Plains Drifters have this kind of uncanny, slightly perturbing sound. They’re not just interested in entertaining you musically, they seem interested in stimulating you. Listening to a High Plains Drifters song is like getting acquainted with a new kind of candy.
URL: https://high-plains-drifters.com/
There’s this multi-layered experience to listening to each of their current tracks, particularly their new single Summer Girl (Redux). It’s like all the pieces are there, but it’s weird. And weird in a manner that isn’t aliennating or leaving you out in the cold, but ironically enough drawing you in closer. This is reflective in the music video as well, an odd mixture of sexy, celestrial, and just out-and-out psychedelic. “Each video uses the isolation that attaches to someone being in outer space as a metaphor for the feeling of a love that has been forever lost.
The videos are visually stunning and, I think (putting all obvious bias aside), really hold a viewer’s interest,” band frontman Larry Studnicky said, in an interview with The Man publication. “We are an unsigned band and do everything on very tight budgets, but these videos are spectacular – they look like some major label spent tons of dough making them.”
It’s something of a trend these days, emulating the look and tone of the eighties. High Plains Drifters very much capitalize on that nostalgia in spades. But they genuinely are able to emote something unique in the process, not just going through the motions of what made popular music at that time some of the pinnacle of artistic culture to this day. There’s a mixture of something that feels painfully earnest and at the same time coldly removed in terms of production value.
Like any good song from the eighties utilizing a certain amount of electronica, they know how to pull you in, then leave you cold. The big bait and switch. It’s part of what makes songs like that endure so well, they often touch on deeply humanistic subject matter lyrically, but not at the expense of great production value and a killer beat. Preferably blasted at level red.
This is reflected in numerous statements High Plains Drifter have made about their work, particularly their preceding single Since You’ve Been Gone, a stark contrast to the upbeat nature of Summer Girl (Redux). “I wrote (that song) on the heels of having been kicked to the curb by a longtime girlfriend. I had believed that we were perfectly matched, and that our love would be the rare kind that stands the test of time.
Events conspired to break us up, and I composed this tune while in the depths of my despair over losing her. I felt as if I’d never recover, and the song speaks to that feeling,” Studnicky stated in the aforementioned interview. “In time, I was able to handle it. As the years passed and people asked, ‘What ever happened to you-know-who?’, I would just answer, ‘She died in a fiery plane crash.’ Untrue, but that’s how I preferred to think about it.”
Garth Thomas