Surfer Blood Entertain Dirty Fantasies in ‘Demon Dance’ – Premiere
It’s been four years since the Florida indie-rock band Surfer Blood was founded by four college freshman at a party at the Ultra Music Festival. A month later, they recorded their debut album, Astro Coast, in a dorm room, hit it big, drove 20 hours to do 13 shows at the CMJ Music Festival in New York and launched into a full tour. Now the boys are back for more with their second album, Pythons, set for release on June 11th on Warner Brothers, and you can get an exclusive first look at the music video for their single “Demon Dance,” directed by Malia James of the Dum Dum Girls.
Singer-guitarist JP Pitts – who has cited Bedhead, Pavement and Yo La Tengo as some of his main influences – stays true to his indie-meets-grunge roots in the new single. The group weaves the two genres through gritty pop vocals, melodic guitars and hard, rhythmic drums.”The lyrics may seem cryptic compared to the straightforward nature of the song, but the song is about dishonest and cruel people I’ve encountered against the backdrop of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Pitts tells Rolling Stone.
Pitts stars in the video as an inexperienced security guard prone to dirty and completely random daydreams – and from images of Pitts’ gym date with a mystery woman to the rest of the band standing stock-still with Eighties-style cell phones, the video supports the song’s odd alt-rock vibe. “The video was shot over the course of two days in an abandoned JC Penney on the outskirts of L.A. Our lovely and brilliant friend Malia James wrote and directed the video,” Thomas Fekete explains. “Anyone who grew up in Florida will tell you that shopping malls were a big part of their childhood. During a recent visit to our hometown, we decided to revisit a few of those places. Needless to say, they were much uglier than we remembered.”