New York City band The Acute wears their bicoastal roots as a badge of pride. Their sound isn’t just punk, but a New Age defiance of genre altogether, pulling inspiration from Can, the Sex Pistols, The Fall, and The Stooges.
‘NYLA’, the single off their recent EP ‘Infinidy’, is a lo-fi journey, with distorted guitar and vocals and lead synths reminiscent of the early 80s, when punk and new wave weren’t quite yet their own separate scenes.
Their new music video, directed by cult filmmaker Dylan Mars Greenberg, shows members Viveca Butler and Stephen Cacouris romping through a snowy day in the East Village. Some scenes are performed in front of the iconic store ‘Trash and Vaudeville’, a clear callback to the east coast aesthetics that shaped punk as we know it.
The video, styled by NYC alt-fashion guru Glitter Macabre, is very much based in that aesthetic – we see the duo transformed from street rockers to fantasy royals straight out of Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, The Acute performs NYLA with the whimsy and chaos of the very bands they take inspiration from, creating a new sound and aesthetic from the old. Their EP ‘Infinidy’ is out now on Spotify, band camp and all other major streaming platforms.
