The Tunnel

Watch The Tunnel's videos for both songs on their new dark, noisy, post-punk EP

San Francisco punks The Tunnel have been at it since 2008, and joined by drummer Michael Jacobs (ex-pOrch) since 2018, and they’re now set to release a new two-song EP, Condemned/Collapse, this Friday (pre-order). The new songs exist somewhere between the noisy post-hardcore of The Jesus Lizard and the gothy post-punk of Killing Joke, and each one has its own creepy black-and-white video created by vocalist/guitarist Jeff Wagner. Here’s what Jeff tells us about them:

These two songs were recorded in February 2020, right before the lockdown started. We banged these two songs out in one day with Jordan Sobolew (Reptoid) in Santo Studio in Oakland, including setup, overdubs and vocals, and Jordan captured that urgency.

Musically they are two different sides of a desperate mood, two different mixtures of physical release and out-of-body elevation. Condemned weaves some strands of Killing Joke/Siouxsie melancholy into the fight-or-flight, and Collapse adds other flavors of Unsane/Jesus Lizard feral sleaze.

Lyrically, the protagonists of both are alienated (of course), lone romantics against a brutal world, etc. I am pretty sure these characters know they are lapsing into self-parody though even as they loathe and love and fall apart.

The two video collages were created together, both influenced by the aesthetics of 80s-90s industrial/sci-fi films like Decoder and Tetsuo:Iron Man, though they also take on the different tones of the two songs.

While the EP isn’t officially out for a couple more days, you can watch both videos right here, right now:

Categories: