Track Premiere: Mother Anxiety – “Victims of Capital”
Hear that roar? Listen to all those beepings, clackings, and ringings, the conduits of modern power, always happening just out of earshot, utterly indifferent to our lives. We are all victims of capital.
This single from Mother Anxiety’s upcoming Guillotine Age is a story of the modern age all in itself. It starts with the ghostly, mournful keenings of the desolations of the first half of the 20th century, the bullet age, before inchoate lines take their first tentative steps out of the mire. Eventually, a retro-cyberpunk loop is born, which serves as an anchor for the rest of the song. At first, it sounds like post-war excitement and promise, all beginnings and economic booms. But, it gets lost in a swell of other developments, and the soft tones of our greatest new technology, telecommunications, crosses everything, the unstoppable tide of capital rushing through it, enveloping the globe and flooding into our very thought patterns. Is there nothing we can do but pick up the pieces after it burns itself out?
The track is oddly bittersweet and comforting in a way, in the light of how accustomed we are to being swallowed by the noise. In fact, I think that’s the primary emotional takeaway from the track for me—the paradoxical combination of a sense of loneliness and a strong feeling of my own connection to the societal narrative I’m a part of and the other people I’m experiencing it with. Mother Anxiety, and even ol’ Papa Despair, are home. A few seconds of stillness close the track, leaving me curious to see what horrors and joys follow it.
Preorder the full album here, and find out on November 25th. Like “Victims of Capital” itself, it’s sure to be a harrowing but satisfying journey.
