Chicago-based Kill Audrey make hazy, chaotic party music for people who buy tall boys with their rent money. Their forthcoming debut album Good Work, due 17 June, is the sound of working-class malaise and distraction: drinking in nosebleed seats, watching the hours crawl by at $13 an hour, cutting corners for top-shelf liquor and thrift store gems, barely outrunning suburban boredom but willing to die trying.
In-house producer Sainty provides noisy and discordant backdrops for the group’s distorted, cocky lyrics, resisting cynicism and self-importance at every turn with frenzied production and droll self-deprecation. Vocals are processed, chipmunked, chopped, and screwed into goofy, light-hearted bangers in the vein of Brockhampton or Tyler, The Creator — but the sentiment at the heart of the project is deadly serious. For every glitchy, noisy posse cut like “Rottweiler”, there’s a “Hereditary”, a muted portrait of how little young people are left with once the structure and expectations of childhood fall away. “I paid all my fines, so I do what I wanna / I look like my mama, I’m drunk like my father.”
The album’s lead single “Hometeam” — the visual for which is premiering exclusively with PopMatters below — is a gritty, urgent track that sends up rap posturing without taking itself too seriously. Anchored by a distorted, churning beat, no verse spares a drop of bad-tempered energy, opening up Kill Audrey’s world of flexes unrestricted by tax bracket.
Watch the visual for “Hometeam” below, which is available to stream on all platforms today.