Vancouver's Concrete Vehicles share new single "Cut Ties" with dystopian 16mm video

Coming off the back of the band’s debut album, Station On The Hill, which folded together post-punk, jazz-rock, and Zappa-esque deconstruction, the band's new single "Cut Ties" explores the way endless connectivity warps into surveillance, isolation ,and disassociation. Vocalist and guitarist Ben Lock frames the song around a character whose relationship with the internet has curdled. “The character is someone who was once happily consumed by the internet and the access to constant entertainment who is starting to realise they are in too deep and feel trapped,” he explains in a press statement.

Music video director Kit Baronas - known for his uneasy short films - mirrors that psychological tangle with surreal imagery. Two figures are bound in string, struggling to separate. A photographer’s face is projected onto another person’s. Crudely animated forms spin in a void, sliced by television lines. Baronas says: “‘Cut Ties’ examines metaphors of observation. It encourages us to sever the ties we hold with others, and those others hold with us. To see each other as we truly are. Rather than as we present ourselves.” The director adds that the images “loosely reflect our current state of parasociality,” prodding at the gap between the version of a person we watch and whoever they might actually be.

Check out the video below.

Concrete Vehicles emerged from a recording project between childhood friends Hudson Schelesny and Ben Lock, originally operating under the name Computer. The pair expanded the group into a seven-piece, adding saxophone, synths, and percussion to recreate the studio material in a live context. They have already played over 50 shows, including appearances at Sled Island, M for Montreal, Left of the Dial, and a previous UK and European tour.

Their live schedule through summer and into autumn keeps the momentum going. The band play Vancouver’s Khatsahlano Street Party on 11 July, support Goat on 13 July, and share a bill with Stitch and 06automatic on 16 July, before a Victoria date at the Eventide Music Series on 22 July. In August they head east to support Alexisonfire in Toronto on the 14th and 15th, then appear at Montreal’s Warped Tour on 22 August. A European leg follows in September, taking in Nantes, Laval, Paris, Belgium’s Leffingeleuren Festival, Amsterdam, Berlin, Hamburg’s Reeperbahn Festival, Duisburg’s Platzhirsch Festival and Rotterdam, before a final stop at Toronto’s Second Summer Festival on 25 September.