There is, perhaps, no easier target for modern dysfunction than Atlanta traffic. It’s constant, it’s exhausting, it’s infuriating, and, worst of all, it feels fucking inevitable. The metaphors pour out easily: The rat race and the hamster wheel. The never-ending spiral into impotence and oblivion. A collective dread that we’re all getting nowhere fast. So when Go Public unleash a jittery torrent of funky geometric post-punk and pointedly exclaim “You are traffic / You are traffic town” on new single “Craps Tempo,” the implications are many. Maybe it’s an indictment of the city, our history of shitty urban planning, and the fossil fuel cartels that keep us locked in a car-centric, highway-bound hellscape. Maybe it’s a shot at consumer culture and the relentless drive for more, bigger, MORE. Or perhaps, to embrace a more humanitarian stance, it’s an acknowledgment that we’re all just sardines trapped in the same tin box. Solidarity, baby!

What is certain, though, is that the Atlanta four-piece felt strongly enough about the sentiment to use it for the title of their debut LP. Due out Sept. 18, You Are Traffic promises a kind of world-weary fatalism set against wiry, discordant songs that are nonetheless bright and danceable. (Or as their bio succinctly puts it, “bleakly vibrant jams for endtime dance parties.”) We got our first taste of that nervy elixir with the controlled chaos of “G.O.L.F.,” but “Craps Tempo” delivers even more confidently on that pledge.

The track feels almost perversely optimistic with its jagged instrumentation careening back and forth between the staccato stomp of the verses and the punchy chorus. Meanwhile, the peppy sing-song vocals add a disarming tinge of Kafkaesque absurdity. It’s a well-worn trick, of course, to obscure dread and despair with bouncy, radiant sonics. Go Public do it with a smirking smile and fever dream intensity.

Directed by Ian Cone, the accompanying video exacerbates that feeling of delirium by continually expanding and contracting its subjects into obtuse shapes. Everything is in constant motion, especially in the traffic scenes where each band is isolated in a separate car, endlessly shifting and rotating. So much movement on the screen, and yet no one appears to be going much of anywhere. Visually the clip is intriguing and eye-catching, but the insinuation is grim: we’re all just circling the drain hoping for an exit.

“It was the easiest thing to do,” Cone says of the video. “Everything was, to slip into a spiraling circle of puppets gurgling down the gullet of another sales funnel for Satan, a steaming torrent of blood, metal and oil, seatbelt edges cut across your sweating baby neck, a thousand hot highways, constriction straps, the helpless jaws of death, human rat traps, it was easy street, 360 degrees.”

Watch/listen above.

You Are Traffic is out Sept. 18 via Happy Happy Birthday To Me. Pre-orders are available here.

More Info
Bandcamp: gopublic.bandcamp.com
Instagram: @gopublicband