Today, Athens/Atlanta power-pop quintet The Shut-Ups reveals a new lyric video for “Eyes Open,” a song off of the recently released album The Shut-Ups are Girls Singing Songs. Often writing from the perspectives of fictional characters, the band has established a reputation of incorporating unpredictable and sometimes even unreliable narratives, but the melodies remain reliably catchy all the same.
“The hook probably would not exist if it weren’t for Paul McCartney, though I wasn’t thinking of him when I wrote it,” says band member Don Condescending about the track. “There’s a bit of Prince in the fake strings.”
Self-described somewhat tongue-in-cheek as “a comprehensive exploration of the female perspective,” the group’s sixth LP presents a collection of songs that were originally pitched to a major label to be performed by an aspiring teenage artist. As the story goes, the songs were not selected, but were later salvaged for the band.
“Generally, I sing on songs that need to project inauthenticity and Ben Spraker sings when we need to project something resembling authentic human emotion,” says band member Don Condescending. “But Jason NeSmith takes the vocal here, his first for the band since our debut album, because his voice has a sweet earnestness that this song seemed to call for.”
“The illustrator is an Egyptian gentleman named Youssef Mostafa,” says Condescending about the music video. “Through exchanging emails with him, I discovered how much we usually depend on figurative language to get our points across. I couldn’t do that with him, and that forced me to explain as literally as possible what was going on in the song.”
The Shut-Ups will head to Atlanta to perform at Star Bar with The Preakness and Catfight on Saturday, Mar. 25. Stay tuned for future announcements on Facebook, and check out other recordings on Bandcamp.
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