Don Broco - Everybody

If you take anything away from this week’s Rock Song of the Week, it should be this; the Don Broco lads know their way around a music video.

Whether it’s Mad Max: Road Warrior shenanigans, secret robots or Beastie Boys inspired David Beckham clones attacking a spaceship, there’d be almost no room for the music if the band didn’t keep putting out fantastic efforts pretty much every single time to balance the scales. It’s a blend of aesthetic and audio that thinks “sod telling the story of the song, let’s just make something bonkers that looks like it was ridiculous fun to shoot”.

The band themselves hail from Bedford in England, a quartet that have been doing their thing since 2008 and have really blown up in the last couple of years. Their early releases are quite lad rock-y (think Arctic Monkeys, etc) which I don’t like quite so much, but as they’ve gone on and broadened their horizons, the music has been not just wildly varied but gotten better and better. This track is taken from their third full studio album Technology, which continued the trend of being wholly stylistically different to most of the stuff they’ve released before. It’s got a much rockier feel, as opposed to the alt/indie leanings of their first album as mentioned and the funk infused second album. They’ve got a fourth on the way this year, which I am chomping at the bit to get hold of, especially given how much I love the singles. Manchester Super Reds No.1 Fan is the aforementioned Beastie Boys-lite stomper that’s the pick of the ones they’ve released so far, so definitely also check out the video for that one.

So to stick on the theme I’ve established; I dig this song a lot, but honestly it’s the video that really steals the show. The only problem I have with it is figuring out how to explain it to people in a way that sells just how good it is, given it’s so bloody weird. Like, how would you explain it at the water cooler the next day?

“So yeah, the Pee-Wee Herman-esque cowboy does a magical cowboy Macarena, right, which he can use to brainwash the woman he’s kidnapped over to his side. Then when the FBI show up it turns out there are five cowboys, four of who are the band themselves, and then…”

“Uh-huh. Look, I’ve got some accounts to balance… wait, do you even work here?”