Formed by Timo Ellis in 2010, Brooklyn-based avant-sludgerock and overall experimental project Netherlands has been blowing minds for a while now with their jagged rhythms, odd time signatures, haunting melodies and hooks, and overall mesmerizing power.
They recently released the remix of “Casual Monsters” by Mario Quintero of Spotlights, bringing back to life one of the sleeper tracks from their 2020 album Zombie Techno. The horrifying message about ideological conformity and how otherwise well-meaning people can be hoodwinked into supporting devastating atrocities rings even truer four years later in light of the United States’ support of Israel’s continued bombardment of Palestinian civilians.
“Casual Monsters is one of the ‘sleeper killers’ off our 2020 Zombie Techno LP (which is personally one of my overall fave NETH records in terms of creating a mood),” explains Ellis about the new track. “The lyrics are about regular people’s ability to be gradually bamboozled into ideological conformity by their society’s status quo social engineers, which IMO appears to be happening more terrifying than ever right now, in the context of (just for one glaring example) the still relatively huge popular U.S. support for the mass-murderous adventures of the gleefully sadistic/racist IDF, and their (our) U.S. imperial benefactors/political and military managers, and musically, it’s kinda like RATM meets Simon and Garfunkel meets Tito Puente, lol.”
Quintero also put together the disturbing video made up of stock footage, YouTube videos, and even clips from the recent Oscar-winning Polish film The Zone of Interest. It creates a shocking and horrifying illustration of how powerful ideology can be, demonstrating a blind faith to an imperialist death machine that will continue to bulldoze the innocent. Check out the video below.
The single is available for purchase on the project’s Bandcamp. Follow Netherlands on Facebook and Instagram for future updates.
As always, free Palestine!
Photo courtesy of Netherlands
