May 12, 2017

Gang Of Youths have relocated to London ahead of the release of their album Go Farther In Lightness on August 18, and it’s sounding pretty spiffy – especially with new single ‘Atlas Drowned’ hitting our earholes this morning.

The politically-fuelled song mourns the current state of global affairs, and comes with a short essay explaining its motives. “We are now converging upon a moment in history seen before countless times, wherein this philosophy of rational self-interest is conflated with nationalism, badly taped together like Homer Simpson’s football tax return,” it reads. Extra points for The Simpsons reference – you can read it in its entirety below.

The single follows the recent release of single ‘What Can I Do If The Fire Goes Out,’ which will also appear on the full-length. Gang Of Youths are currently touring across Europe before tackling the United States, and soon after the release of Go Farther In Lightness, they’ll be returning to Australia for Jindabyne’s winter festival Snowtunes at the beginning of September plus a national headline tour.

Listen to both tracks from the album below, including all dates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svjuhu8t080

the central tenets of “objectivism”, as espoused in the loathsome, inept, lumbering, clunky, boring monstrosity that is Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (1957) are contingent on a system she determines to be a form of objective “rational self-interest”. this has, for some reason set the ideological tone for so many wanton, neo-con, boot-licker crybabies for so long, the book itself has become victim of its own reflexive, parodic intellectual posturing. objective? refutable. rational? i don’t for a moment believe that self interest is in any way, rational. it is (to paraphrase david hume), contingent on the passions. it is counter-humanity, truly and deeply antithetical to becoming über. it’s a shame so many of the adherents to this pathetic system seem to conflate nietzsche’s doctrine of the übermensch (every individual can and should become über) with the idiocy of rand’s (some people are just better than others).

humanity’s progress and advancement cannot be attributed to the pissing, moaning and wrenching of a handful of privileged industrialists alone. our great societies were built on the backs of the worker, the “prole”, the individuals that make up collective often labouring under the obscene, unrestrained tyranny of the few. this is not some radical new idea acting as a harbinger of some doomed anarchic futurescape — i believe that this has underlined the history of every great civilisation.

we are now converging upon a moment in history seen before countless times, wherein this philosophy of rational self-interest is conflated with nationalism, badly taped together like homer simpson’s football tax return.

reluctantly, i’ll admit that at the very ideological heart of conservatism there is a noble tradition. what we are seeing now globally, en masse is a desecration of this nobility.

enough of this shit.