Video: Steady Holiday, ‘Who’s Gonna Stop Us’

Daiana Feuer on July 20th, 2018

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Steady Holiday‘s Dre Babinski’s voice is as light as a snowflake and delicate as dandelion fuzz. Reminiscent of the Cardigans’ Nina Persson, you just want to hold it in your hands as long as possible before it melts or floats away. Her gentle singing renders the message about manipulation and control in “Who’s Gonna Stop Us” that much more chilling, and the video, directed by Isaac Ravishankara, serves the tone perfectly in its balance of soft and dark.

The song sums up the concept behind “Nobody’s Watching,” her new album produced by Gus Seyffert, coming out Aug. 24 on Barsuk Records. She imagined a deceptive leader and their predecessor at odds and built up the ideas for the record to an extent around this song. An extension of last year’s “Terror” EP, the album explores themes “like greed, fear and self-interest; the ugly and troubling edges of human nature,” she says. The leader she had in mind is as charming as Charles Manson and clever like Howard Hill from “The Music Man,” and she feels it’s important to point out that while it may seem our moment in history is overwhelmingly and uniquely devastating, open up the pages to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” and we see it’s a pattern that’s repeated over all time and (I agree) people need to keep that in perspective. “I’ve been just as affected by our current politics as anyone,” says Babinski, “but it only takes one step back to realize these same figures have been present since the beginning of civilization. This record is sort of an anthropological way of unpacking all this discomfort for me.”

||| Watch: “Who’s Gonna Stop Us”