Video premiere: Wargirl, ‘2069’

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Wargirl

Wargirl’s calling card is not just their gritty mix of garage, psych, funk and disco, but it’s the esprit de corps the Long Beach sextet shows in just about everything they do. “We don’t fight, we don’t argue, we make music together from a very true place and we do so with spontaneity and passion,” mastermind Matt Wignall said earlier this year. “We are dancing our asses off when we make these songs in the studio because we are always recording them almost completely live.”

Wargirl’s sophomore album “Dancing Gold,” which came out Friday, makes the dancing part almost an imperative, thanks in no small part to charismatic singer Samantha Parks. She, Wignall and bandmates Tamara Raye, Enya Preston, Erick Diego Nieto and Jeff Suri embody the idea that music can be a unifying (and even political) force, a formidable weapon in the war on complacency.

And that shows in the video for one of the album’s highlights, “2069.” The footage comes from a gig earlier this year at Chelsea in Vienna, Australia, just before the band’s European tour was truncated by the coronavirus shutdown, forcing them to scramble and find a way back to the U.S.

“The song ‘2069’ muses on the idea that the ’60s are coming again, and the work that didn’t get done the last time in regards to world peace and racial equality could maybe get solved next time around,” Wignall says. “It’s wild that all this protesting broke out after [we] essentially made an album where we were talking about a lot of these things in constructive terms as a racially mixed band, and hoping for a better future. A lot of the songs can seem like fun pop songs at face value, but there is a lot behind them in terms of thoughts and conversations. We always want to say something and not just fill up space.”

It’s a time when there are movements afoot, and director Brent Firestone captures Wargirl leading one small one.

||| Watch: The tour video for “2069”

||| Also: Watch the Britt Cherry/Matt Wignall animated video for “2069”

||| Also: Stream “Dancing Gold” in its entirety

||| Previously: Wargirl’s Quarantunes, “Dancing Gold,” 2019 Albums of the Year, “How You Feel,” “Mess Around”