On their brand new single “XOUT” Chicago post-punk band FACS dials up the tension to suffocating and nightmarish degrees.
The three-piece formed by guitarist and singer Brian Case, drummer Noah Ledger and bassist Aliana Kalaba has been known to create auditory strangleholds on their listeners with a sound that owes as much to the tightly wound rhythms of Fugazi as it does to post-rock and shoegaze.
In a new video for the track — directed by longtime collaborator Josh Ford — the band is able to depict the song’s unrelenting pressure in a tight three-minute fever dream.
There’s a moment at the one-minute mark where there is a shift from slow motion trippy portraits of the band to rapid fire snapshots of American farms, factories and small towns in different stages of decay as the seasons change.
Just before the sequence reaches seizure-inducing intensity, it snaps back to more subdued moments of the band together in the wilderness. It’s an impressionistic representation of how we as a society have designed our lives to avoid each other over the last year.
In a press release, Ford explains the mood driver and, at times, panic attack inducing kaleidoscope visuals he spliced together to match the band’s intensity.
“I put FACS behind glass for this video, maybe subconsciously marking this time and place to some degree,” he said in a statement. “The ‘XOUT’ video comes out right one year into the pandemic, most of us have lived with some fear/dread over the last year, all of us have felt a sense of separation. That simple idea grew into an organic stream-of-consciousness sequence of video and still images that I’ve captured over the years in the midwest and southwest.”
Ford — who has also directed videos for the FACS songs “Teenage Hive” and “In Time” — explains that this dreamlike quality of their collaborations is merely incidental as their music seems to naturally pull him in that direction.
“There was never an intention to make the videos from the last 3 albums fit together, but looking back now there are some visual threads that run throughout,” he said. “ The link in visual aesthetic is 100% attributable to how I feel hearing the work that Brian/Ali/Noah create. I feel like they are able to crack the code, open a door, take you somewhere else. I think each of the videos tries to take the ride with them, to somewhere else, some other place.”
FACS’ new album Present Tense will be released May 21 by Trouble In Mind Records.