Brunch return with double A-side singles “Please Kill Me” and “Man Alive”

The band is comprised of guitarists Philip Bern and Cameron Mincar, bassist Mason Kosman, and drummer Ayden Flanigan, and marked the release with a show at Brooklyn venue Purgatory last night. The video for “Please Kill Me” was filmed at Devil’s Bowl Speedway in Vermont in grainy, home movie-style footage. It includes a full electric performance on the dirt track after the racing had finished. “Halfway through the race there was a huge four car pileup that took a construction crew 30 minutes to remove,” the band said. “After the race the owners let us out onto the tracks in our van and we set up right in the middle and played along to the song.”

“Please Kill Me” takes its name from the oral history of punk, by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil. The band said the song “sounds almost like it could belong to any decade without exactly belonging to any of them”, drawing on Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound, psych-era Beatles, and synthesisers from multiple periods.

“Man Alive” moves into synthwave territory and is, by the band’s account, their most personal material yet. “It’s about struggling with the difficulties of being a human while holding onto radical hopefulness and love for others,” they said. “It’s a song about radical antagonisms; light and darkness, dreams and reality, each defining itself by its own opposite.”

Brunch formed in Burlington during the pandemic while the four members were studying philosophy at the University of Vermont. They share songwriting and lead vocal duties, and previous releases include 2023 debut album Parasocial, 2024 EP DOGINYA, and last year’s live EP Live At Robot Dog. The band are already at work on another record.