It’s been nearly four years since Shepherds released their first full length Exit Youth, and no one needs to be reminded what a hellscape the country has become in the intervening time. So it should come as no surprise that the introspective art rockers’ latest offering — the first from the group’s forthcoming LP, Insignificant Whip — is a sharp critique of toxic nostalgia, America’s culture of hypocrisy, and every vanilla suburb you’ve ever visited. Set against rolling drums and panicked bursts of guitar, “Your Imagined Past” acknowledges the country’s so-called golden years weren’t so great for anyone who wasn’t white, male, and an heir to intergenerational wealth.

Directed by Kether Drella, the video takes a deep dive into the powerful iconography of the 1950s through the ’80s to interrogate and skewer these delusions. As singer Jonathan Merenivitch demystifies the American cult with political interjections like “that moment of love was biological,” the clip offers allusions to pro-smoking and anti-drug PSAs while the band poses as day-drunk members of the country’s leisure class. It’s all delivered with casual, tongue-in-cheek coolness, which only amplifies the band’s rejection of heteronormativity, American exceptionalism, and all the catchphrase MAGA bullshit that so many boomers swear as gospel.

“Like many things from the record, this video is inspired by a late-night YouTube wormhole,” Merenivitch explains via email. “The kind of YouTube wormhole where you bounce from Japanese City Pop to Source Awards clips to Fry and Laurie sketches and back again. On one of these particular sojourns I stumbled upon an 80’s anti-crack PSA featuring Clint Eastwood. The smoky, eerie image of that squinty boomer anti-hero intoning about the dangers of crack, backlit and somber, hit me like a bolt from the blue. It seemed to speak so much to the themes of this album. Anxiety, boomer arrogance, culture falling in on itself. Who was this PSA for exactly? Not the real victims of the crack epidemic of the ’80s. Young black folks who would probably look upon Dirty Harry as a stand-in for the authority figures who routinely violated their civil rights. Maybe it was for people who would never use such an unglamorous drug as crack. The upstanding, white, moral citizens of the age who probably stuck to fancy stuff like cocaine. Y’know, hypocrites. Whatever the case, with the help of our director Kether Drella we were inspired to take a journey into a bygone world of commercials and PSAs and see how cultural values mutate overtime. Pro-beer and pro-cigarette commercials become anti-cigarette and anti-drug PSA’s as good times become bad times and the cultural values we once held dear are shown to be lacking. Because, like the song says, you were full of shit then and you’re full of shit now.”

Watch/listen above.

Insignificant Whip is out Oct. 18 via Arrowhawk Records. Pre-orders are available here.

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