Kevin Bronson on December 3rd, 2020

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* We’ve updated this post with the full album stream, below.

If the COVID-19 lockdown needed a slogan, “Stuck With Yourself” would be pretty apropos.

It’s also the title track of New Language’s second album, arriving Friday. The song is a bristling, menacing rocker recalling the progenitors who first introduced synths into post-punk music. And the L.A. trio’s new video for the song suits 2020 as well — a montage of screens displaying art-damaged images and effects, all suggesting a perilous level of self-loathing. Or, exactly where many of us have been living the past nine months.

The song actually predates the pandemic, though. The band explains that it addresses a friend’s spiral of self-sabotaging behavior. That friend exhibited “Munchausen syndrome,” which is a disorder wherein those affected pretend to be affected by an illness or trauma to draw attention, sympathy or reassurance. You know the type: “Living in a pattern of rejecting common sense,” as frontman Tyler Demorest sings.

“At the end of the day, you only have yourself,” bassist Matt Cohen says, “so you better be happy with who you are and what you do. You have to control your own destiny, in a sense.”

New Language delivers that message with no small amount of sarcasm. How this lyric for a 2020 T-shirt? “Everyone is crazy and don’t try to change my mind.”

||| Watch: The video for “Stuck With Yourself”

||| Also: Check out “Paranoid” and the full album, “Stuck With Yourself”

||| Previously: “No Time”