Video: The Paranoyds, ‘Girlfriend Degree’

Kevin Bronson on June 18th, 2019

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After three EPs of nervy, genre-mashing indie-rock, the Paranoyds have announced that their debut album, “Carnage Bargain,” will be out Sept. 13 via Suicide Squeeze Records.

Since 2015, the band (Staz Lindes, Laila Hashemi, Lexi Funston and David Ruiz) has cultivated a sound that’s equal parts garage-rock, grrl-power punk and edgy New Wave — and all attitude. The latter quality does not figure to wane on the full-length. Witness the new single “Girlfriend Degree,” a strong self-affirmation in the form of a pop-punk tune.

“‘Girlfriend Degree’ is a call to arms, a reminder to be a supremely self-loving woman, to just do you,” the band says. “There’s all this pressure about being ‘the ideal woman,’ and it’s easy to get caught up in that-to spend your time trying to be all these things that others think you should be. Getting a ‘girlfriend degree’ is about settling, selling oneself short and not believing in yourself-valuing your partner’s beliefs or opinions over your own. It’s cool to be a girlfriend or wife or whatever, but there’s so much more to being a woman than that.

“This desire to be above that is also somewhat a telling of how our band came to be. We were all going to a bunch of shows and obviously having a great time and it took us a bit for us to realize that we could also make and perform our own music … and that nothing was preventing us from doing that besides ourselves. We all have power and we should use that power to exercise our own agency.”

Ambar Navarro directs the single’s trippy video.

||| Watch: The video for “Girlfriend Degree”