See Tool-Approved Industrial Band 3Teeth Face Down Riot Cops in New Video
Early this year L.A.-based industrial band 3Teeth played to their biggest audiences yet, opening for Tool, whose guitarist Adam Jones handpicked them for the group’s first tour in nearly two years. “We’d been sort of flying under the radar, really doing things on our own terms,” frontman Alexis Mincolla told us in December, right before the shows. “It wasn’t really until Adam decided to put us on the tour that everybody went, ‘Hey, who the fuck are these guys?'”
Now that more music fans than ever know the answer to that question, 3Teeth have released a hard-hitting new song “Atrophy” and its fittingly in-your-face music video. The song – which the band started writing at the end of last year before putting it on the back burner to tour with Tool – is “about living in a culture of perpetual distractions and fighting back against the underuse of our own minds that occurs as a result of it,” according to Mincolla.
For the video, the singer imagined a “sort of exaggerated allegory” of the situation he addresses in his lyrics, and to that end the band gathered with a group of friends in an L.A. warehouse to film what he describes as a “miniature Stanford prison experiment.” The results were interesting, to say the least.
“Watching how fast everyone’s headspace transformed once they went into wardrobe was definitely entertaining,” the singer recalls. “It’s like you give someone a nightstick and uniform and they’ll just start bossing people around.”
The shoot also resulted in a trip to the emergency room for one unlucky participant. “We decided to shoot the final battle at full speed to get a more genuinely chaotic effect,” Mincolla says. “Apparently everyone had watched enough online videos of police brutality and riot porn to create their own stage directions as it got semi out of hand and resulted in having to send one person off to the E.R. with an accidental split lip. Fortunately, they’re fine and there’s no hard feelings. All in all, it was a great day.”
3Teeth tour dates:
August 27 – London, UK @ Elektrowerkz
August 28 – Bradford, UK @ Infest
September 1 – San Francisco, CA @ DNA Lounge
September 2 – Los Angeles, CA @ Viper Room
September 3 – Phoenix, AZ @ Club Red Rocks
September 4 – Denver, CO @ Riot Fest
September 15 – Kansas City, MO @ The Riot Room
September 16 – Chicago, IL @ Riot Fest
September 17 – Toronto, ON @ The Velvet
October 24 – Salt Lake City, UT @ Maverick Centre (with Tool)
October 28 – Little Rock, AR @ Verizon Arena (with Tool)
October 29 – Detroit, MI @ Small’s