Kevin Bronson on September 30th, 2020

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The implied call to action in Grandson’s new single — “Do you have enough love in your heart / to go and get your hands dirty?” — delivers an elbow to the ribs to anybody who’s watching today’s apocalyptic political theater from the sidelines.

The song certainly has enough heart.

“Dirty” arrived last week as the latest body blow from genre-hopping Canadian-American artist Jordan Benjamin, along with the news that the first Grandson album, “Death of an Optimist,” would be out Dec. 4. “It is both an origin story and an obituary navigating hope, anxiety and the state of optimism in 2020,” he says of the album.

Grandson writes about such matters as political and social issues and mental health, and the video for “Dirty” — directed by Karl Junquist, who did visuals for “Identity” and “Riptide” — follows the artist’s multiple personalities in and out of incarceration. Like the song, it hits hard.

The grandkids will be happy the right personality prevails.

||| Watch: The video for “Dirty”

||| Previously: “Riptide” and “Identity”