Toronto quartet Pup have been a bit of a DIY punk rock phenomenon. The critical darlings effectively broke through with the 2019 album Morbid Stuff, and the band are clearly poking fun at that in the new video for “Totally Fine,” which is presumably the final pre-album single before The Unraveling Of PupTheBand drops next week.
The song sees Pup raucously beating through another punk anthem. The drums are wild, guitar riffs are flying all over the place, and it’s the reckless abandon that people have come to embrace about the band. The video, however, is on a whole new level. Part Don’t Look Up and part sinister Steve Jobs saga, it sees the band “quitting music,” to go corporate, only to prove themselves as crooked as the very corporations who govern us all — they’ve dubbed it one of the “Greatest Music Videos Of All Time
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It’s a cathartic song released among capitalism’s never-ending hoopla and the band shared a statement on the serendipitous inspiration behind it:
“We wrote ‘Totally Fine’ after a long creative drought. We all agreed to take a break from PUP during lockdown, to take some time to deal with our mental health and get some space from each other. After 3 months of not writing any songs, ‘Totally Fine’ was the first thing to pop out. It broke this creative dam wide open, just months worth of pent up frustration all smashed into this one song. After that, we ended up going on a bit of a tear and wrote the rest of the record really quickly. The drumming on this song still blows our minds. It’s so manic and wild and makes the song feel like it’s about to fall apart at any moment, which is kinda like how it feels to be in PUP.”
Watch the video for “Totally Fine” above.
The Unraveling Of PupTheBand is out 4/1 via Little Dipper/Rise Records. Pre-order it here.