What do you say in the lyrics of the song?Â
We hint at themes of social hierarchy, undeserved deference, the myth of trickle-down economics, and whatâs called âtugging the forelockâ in an age of such chaos, incompetence and division such as ours. Itâs just what came out at the time!Â
The call-and-response vocal deliveries fitted with the spacious but spiky collage of sounds we were trying to create, but it took me a long time to experiment and be happy with the lyrics and delivery in the verses. I wanted it to be like an angry rant but not so over the top that it loses composure or sounds like it doesnât fit with the track.
What is your message to the world?
Thereâs no overarching explicit general message from us, itâs all in the music. As for the message in the song you could say âDislocationâ serves well as a thematic sequel to âHave you got your country back yet?â in that itâs about watching British politics play out from afar in the years during and post-Brexit. Wondering out loud and despairing at people voting against their own interests, or believing nonsense just because itâs spoken by someone with perceived status, money, a posh accent, or they're just dog whistling.
How and in what situation did this song come about?Â
As an initial demo, I was messing with samples trying to make a stop-start breaks kind of rhythm with added pieces of abstract percussion and found the basic groove and bass line. It got to a certain point when Jonas and Kora came up with the guitar parts and the âLet the world...â chorus, added better drums and synths, and then it started to come together.Â
We produce all of our music in our small rented rehearsal studio in Berlin-Marzahn and iterate on several demos simultaneously. Without the pressure of paying for fixed time in a recording studio, it can take us a long while to get songs finished, but we go at our own pace and get to experiment a lot which works for us.
What does the song cover represent?
Throughout this series of Dark Patterns singles, Iâve been creating collages using the Chronicling America website as the only resource. I have a method of using search terms based on lyrics or themes in the song, then I find some potentially interesting imagery or parts of old newspaper pages and go from there. I believe adding limitations like this can bring about interesting results in art. For this particular piece, I found the blindfolded couple and based it around them, plus some headlines and snippets that I found to be suggestive or relevant.
What does this song say about your country, Germany?Â
The lyrics werenât written with Germany in mind at all. There are similarities and we have our problems here, mainly with the rise of the far-right, but the inspiration came from a growing disconnection to my old home of the UK, which looks more unrecognisable and feels more ideologically distant and foreign to me as time goes on.