For many years, Alex Edkins led the extremely sick Toronto noise-rock power trio METZ. Now, he's half of the duo Noble Rot with Holy Fuck's Graham Walsh, and he makes his own excellent power-pop jams under the name Weird Nightmare. This spring, Edkins will follow Weird Nightmare's very cool 2023 self-titled debut with a new album called Hoopla. We already the singles "Forever Elsewhere" and "Might See You There," which rock. Today, he shares another new one, and this one rocks just as hard.
Alex Edkins co-produced Hoopla with Spoon's Jim Eno, and the new single "Pay No Mind," which is not a Beck cover, sounds a lot like what might happen if prime Spoon decided that they wanted to try making classically jittery pop-punk. That sounds cool, right? That sounds like something you'd be into? Well, it is cool. You should be into it. History shows us that people can remain in complete obscurity while cranking out total power-pop gems like this one, so it's our shared mission, yours and mine, to make sure that doesn't happen here.
Here's what Edkins has to say about "Pay No Mind" and its accompanying Ryan Faist-directed video:
The lyric was lifted from an Atlantic City tourism t-shirt. "I’m so broke, I can’t even pay attention" struck me as a particularly accurate comment on modern life. Obviously, the shirt is meant to be funny, but it felt quite dark to me. Due to the overwhelming onslaught of information and emotional baggage that comes with it, I think there is a tendency for people’s lives to become quite myopic. As a coping mechanism, we become more and more insular, ignoring the world around us...
We had a blast making this video with director Ryan Faist. It was a nod to the Elvis Costello And The Attractions "Pump it Up" video and some early footage of the Buzzcocks on cable access TV.
Check it out below.
Hoopla is out 5/1 on Sup Pop, or Dine Alone in Canada.
