“Rage Against the Miami Sound Machine” is a chaos-kissing track from Limitations, NEEDS‘ second full-length, which was recently released this past June. Contrary to its title, Limitations builds on the wry post-post-hardcore of their self-titled debut album from 2015. According to the vocalist Sean Orr, the inspiration behind the song dates back to a moment of revelation and mixed feelings he had while attending the stacked, CMJ-adjacent AdHoc Car Wash concert in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that same year that NEEDS was released. The song’s defiant cry of defeat, “We had it! / They fucked us! / We lost!”, was borrowed from a piece on a music site that cited the failure of Rage Against the Machine’s debut album to spark the revolution they called for.
The video for “Rage Against the Miami Sound Machine” tells a classic “boy meets real estate shark, boy organizes an impromptu mob, boy kidnaps real estate shark” tale, which begins, delightfully, in a mall, before taking it to the streets. Video director Mike Babz recalls, “it was an exciting shoot in some high profile public locations without any permits. That crazy energy really shows in the footage. The cops did pay us a visit, but we got the shots. Guerrilla filmmaking – lots of fun!” NEEDS have taken shots at gentrification before (see “The Only Good Condo Is a Dead Condo” from their debut), which is no surprise considering they come from Vancouver, where the pains of rapid high-end development are especially acute.