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Pill's Slimeball Punk Gorges On Sickly Sweet 'Fruit'

Pill makes slimeball punk gorged on sickly sweet sounds, so it's only fitting that the band makes slimeball videos that both indulge and expose a slimeball decadence with perverse glee. The Brooklyn band today announces its second album, Soft Hell, with a hyper-saturated eye-feast for "Fruit." We don't recommend viewing before lunch.

Pill, <em>Soft Hell</em>
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Pill, Soft Hell

"For Pill's 'Fruit' video, we wanted to create a grotesque and colorful bacchanale of bulls*** while blowing kisses at Le Grande Bouffe, the color palette of an LSD-tinged Betty Crocker cookbook, and the recent trend in millenial slime," writes Kathi Kniess and Eli Welbourne of Studio Kānde in a press release. "We gently suggest viewing this through the lens of a 1990s Saturday morning Claymation interstitial, while you gobble down a bowl of sugary cereal."

Le Grande Bouffe is a helluva touchstone — the 1973 French-Italian film amped up bourgeois satire to death, its characters quite literally eating themselves into a grossly self-indulgent suicide pact. But set to Pill's jittery post-punk, slurped with maximalist juxtapositions that collide saxophone and piano over a nodding groove, I think the brightly-colored food fight from Hook might offer a more apt visual comparison. There's a silliness in the video's green noodles, blue jello, bright red watermelon and pink slime, as anonymous hands play with their food like precocious kids discovering fire. Bangarang!


Soft Hell comes out Oct. 26 via Mexican Summer. Pill goes on tour with Eleanor Friedberger starting Sept. 13.

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