Beauty Pill tell us “You Need a Better Mind” on their new single.

Photo by Morgan Klein

Washington, D.C.-based band Beauty Pill today announced their new EP Instant Night out December 3, releasing on limited edition vinyl, CD and digitally via Northern Spy Records and available to preorder here. Alongside the announcement the band is sharing the official video for “You Need A Better Mind“. On the track, Beauty Pill’s Chad Clark says:

“The Roland TB-303 is an old Japanese synthesizer that was designed to convincingly mimic the sound of a bass guitar.  It was introduced in 1981, it sounded like a toy and failed miserably, and it was ultimately discontinued in 1984. It makes freaky, wiggly, cartoony sounds.  It sounds fuck-all like a bass guitar. Why am I telling you this?  One ended up in my hands for a week. I did a lot of silly stuff with it.  I did come up with this one worthwhile riff, which I built a song around.  The song is called “You Need A Better Mind.”

“It was recorded with my band in a single take at the end of a recording session for another song. We were tired. None of us cared that much if we failed. The fun spirit you hear in this song is mostly exhaustion… that kind of punchy exhaustion you get late at night when you’ll laugh at anything. The lyrics were inspired by the spooky/funny 10-minute movie “Rachel”. “The song is about the scourge of American loneliness. It is by far the fastest, easiest song Beauty Pill has ever created. We hope you like it.”

The EP’s title track “Instant Night” was originally written by Beauty Pill bandleader Chad Clark in 2015 after he watched Ann Coulter, as a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher, predict that Donald Trump would win the 2016 US presidential election. The Washington, D.C. based artist recorded and surprise-released the single in October 2020 out of urgency to inspire people to vote in the presidential election. Because the song was being recorded during the pandemic, and because Clark has an artificial heart that puts him at high risk for COVID-19, it was recorded on a rooftop, with meticulously planned social distancing.

“Instant Night” is Beauty Pill’s first single without drums, and it is also the first Beauty Pill song to conspicuously highlight the band’s woodwind quartet. The single was released alongside a music video featuring time-lapse footage of Trump, Lindsey Graham, and Mitch McConnell being drawn and depicted as monsters. The video was created and directed by the artist [ex-Beauty Pill member] Ryan Nelson.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Cody at Clandestine PR.]

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Nik Havert

I've been a music fan since my parents gave me a record player for Christmas when I was still in grade school. The first record I remember owning was "Sesame Street Disco." I've been a professional writer since 2004, but writing long before that. My first published work was in a middle school literary magazine and was a story about a zoo in which the animals could talk.

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