- 2022-05-02
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MUSIC
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Donate to support families affected by the crisis in Ukraine ➔ Five Hundred Bucks Releases New Music Video for “Follicles” from Debut Album “$500”
Philadelphia-based punk rock band Five Hundred Bucks, consisting of Jeff Riddle (vocals/guitar/bass), William Francis Orender (drums), Jonathan Hernandez (guitar) and Ross Bogan (Keyboards), released their debut album “$500” along with a new music video for “Follicles” on April 29, 2022.
The band recorded the album at Ocean Industries with producer Jeff Leonard Jr.
Jeff Riddle, who also co-produced the album, said, “The record, on a whole, has an air of gleeful nihilism, or dare I even say optimistic nihilism to it, whatever the hell that means. There's a lot of 'I really want to give up or quit, but I don't know what the hell else I would do so I might as well stick with it,' which is a sentiment that I've felt when it comes to music or just even life in general.”
The video was directed by Matthew John Lawrence. Jeff Riddle said, “Matthew John Lawrence (writer/director of Uncle Peckerhead) and I wrote the concept together and got a lot of the crew from Uncle Peckerhead back together to make the video. Jared Balog, who did all the special and practical effects for the movie, built us a life-like dead alien and Wicky Mendoza the production designer/costumer came on board to work on it too and I produced it. It was our first time working with Tony Coon the cinematographer/camera operator who just really knocked it out of the park and was such a huge help he became a producer on it.”- t_8d5CSnXjA
He continued, “The video is a narrative driven video about a lonely person who lives in rural America and a UFO crashes and he finds this dead alien. He brings it inside and cleans it up and develops an attachment and friendship with it and it's the closest he's ever felt to being accepted by anyone. We didn't make the video as a direct correlation to the song, but it has a lot of thematic parallels.”
He said of the song, “The song “Follicles” is pretty personal to me. It's about my parents and their shortcomings as a mother and father. It's about growing older and having perspective on the situation and realizing who they were and what they were going through and despite my best efforts to separate myself from them at an early age and not want to be like them, fighting some of the same battles that they fought — depression, anxiety, addiction etc.”-
Photo by Jared Wood - source : Apple Music
