ALASKALASKA explore existential detainment with ‘TV Dinners’
ALASKALASKA, comprised of Lucinda Duarte-Holman and Fraser Rieley, have shared a new single, ‘TV Dinners’, following up from ‘Growing Pains (Unni’s Song)’ and ‘Still Life’, in anticipation of their second full-length studio album Still Life.
The track is a stream-of-consciousness poetic exploration of being able to enjoy the solitude of lockdown whilst airing the simultaneous guilt that arises from feeling like you are wasting away sitting in front of the television.
‘TV Dinners’ opens with a graceful nod to the starting tunes of the Windows operating systems of yore before a simple processed beat comes in, accompanied by a descending piano chord progression. The vocals pierce through the mix with a distinctive Thom Yorke feel to them. In fact, the track in sum could easily be a Yorke solo demo.
About midway through the tune, a siren-like synth indicates the time for the song to really kick into action, where Lucinda Duarte-Holman repeats the refrain, “Another TV dinner, not the news.” The song manages to create a state of disarray and anxiety that comes as the product of being locked inside with not much to do apart from staring at the screen and thinking of days of freedom.
Duarte-Holman said that the tune “was the only song on the album written during lockdown. I wrote it in about 20 minutes as a stream-of-consciousness kind of poem. Very literal. Even though like a lot of people, I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself under the circumstances, I was still really quite happy to have some time doing nothing – noticing the way the light changed in my flat and the sound of the birds and trees outside.”
She added, “I felt a real sense of privilege that I was able to enjoy a space in time that for a lot of people was incredibly testing on so many levels. And with that privilege, a sense of guilt: ‘What once was bliss becomes a certain kind of ignorance.’ We all take part in it in some way – you can change the channel if the news becomes too much or steer away from doom-scrolling, and I think you should as a way of protecting yourself, but I also think it’s important to recognize that its a privilege to be able to do so.”
‘TV Dinners’ showcases a duo continuing to experiment with a wide variety of electronic influences and is a welcome counterbalance to the now tired wave after wave of post-punk acts coming out of England’s capital. Still Life will be released on October 14th, and we will look forward to it in great anticipation.
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