Video: Gateway Drugs, ‘Wait (Medication)’
Kevin Bronson on
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It’s been five years since the arrival of L.A. quartet Gateway Drugs’ debut album “Magick Spells,” a release that followed a good year of blowing L.A.’s collective ears back at live shows.
The band — siblings Liv, Noa and Gabe Niles and longtime friend James Sanderson — dial into a shoegazing/psychedelic sound that recalls Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, the Stone Roses, early Blur, the Jesus and Mary Chain and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Theirs is a dense, chaotic beauty: pop songs laced with ennui, menace and scorn, guitars blazing.
The slide-drenched new single “Wait (Medication),” released today, announces Gateway Drugs’ return after a period of upheavals. Their sophomore album, “PSA,” was produced by the Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner at Josh Homme’s Pink Duck Studios, and the quartet describes it as a reflection of “everything that is wrong in the here and now and the almost total state of apathy we all find ourselves in due to feeling powerless to effect any change with respect to all of this.”
As for “Wait,” they say it’s about “falling in love with madness. When sustenance is stolen and your vice becomes your friend, your lover. Romanticization of loneliness and despair. The delight of debauchery and the consequences of excess.”
From a band who once proclaimed “Fridays Are for Suckers,” it’s a cautionary tale, but exactly the kind that drags you down temptation road.
“PSA” will be out May 8 on Future Shock Records.
||| Watch: The video for “Wait (Medication)”
||| Also: Stream the song here
||| Previously: “Fridays Are for Suckers”
[…] Chain, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and shoegazey side of the Duke Spirit should pull up a chair. “Wait (Medication)”, released in late March, was an immediate highlight, and for the next two singles, Gabe and Liv […]