Dream Nails – This Is The Summer (Alcopop! Records)
Ahead of the release of their debut album this week punk witches Dream Nails share a video for new track This Is The Summer.
Artist: Dream Nails
Track: This Is The Summer
Label: Alcopop! Records
Released: 24 August 2020
Find it: YouTube
The weather has finally broken here, and from darkening skies a heavy rain falls, instantly greening parched gardens, parks, and fields. But for another few weeks there, temperatures soared with clothes sticking to skin, and everything – everything – melted.
It’s not all fun through the summer days, and all kinds of good heat through the summer nights but the tension. At a certain point (around the 30°c mark) you pause in the lollygagging on crispy lawns to wonder if it might just keep getting hotter, and instinctively feel the fear in it. Along with the heat comes a wave of violence, or protest, or both. From across the centuries and the welcoming dusty cool of the crumbling parchment page echoes the Shakespearean wisdom, ‘For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring’, as you watch the news stream image after image, city after city, country after country. It is not only the heat which is oppressive.
‘Heatwave / Mercy please / Don’t wanna see men’s knees in February’
These times are perfectly captured by high priestesses of punk, Dream Nails. With a long-awaited debut album due out this week they’ve teased us with another video. As ever it sets the most serious of commentary, against tongue-in-cheek and playful approaches melodically and visually. With This Is The Summer we get a blistering environmental punk anthem, somewhere between The Undertones and La Luz in sound.
Lyrically reflecting summer in the city before an urgent and snappy middle eight listing of the world’s most pressing problems. The visuals change to real footage from recent riots as each item lands as an indirect accusation over our attention being on tanning and iced coffee and the devastating and potentially civilisation-ending legacy of colonialism and the planet-killing pillaging capitalism is undertaking.
Sharing the video they said, “We wrote this song in the 2018 heatwave. We recorded this song in the 2019 heatwave. We filmed the video in the 2020 heatwave. Each summer gets worse and worse – and people are still busy drinking in the park instead of fighting for climate justice.”
There is no surrender in the music of Dream Nails: This Is The Summer is another shake-to-wake call to arms which is as much about the message as it is the medium of music. The energy and commitment of this band is incredible. Not only are their politics in every note and every word, but they are making sure that carries through in how they work. After years of persevering and holding their space as a female and queer punk band it will be a victory not only for them and the fruition of their hard work and determination, but on so many other levels too, when their album is released. One of the most important bands of our time – delivering what is certainly the most important messages we’d all do well to heed.
Dream Nails debut album is released via Alcopop! Records on 28 August 2020.
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Sarah Lay
A long-standing music journalist she's also co-founder of independent record label Reckless Yes, an author of novels, and when not messing around with words and music, a digital strategist.
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