Video: Agender, ‘Trouble & Desire’ / ‘Womb to Wound’

Kevin Bronson on May 27th, 2022

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L.A. quartet Agender went eight years between albums, but they returned today with the release of “No Nostalgia,” a barrage of ferocious post-punk that thrums between well-aimed venom, understandable mania and dark humor.

“The album reads as a newspaper or a collage,” says Australian band leader Romy Hoffman, a onetime hip-hop artist who, since 2014’s “Fixations,” released music as ROMY and flexed her skills as a DJ and promoter, helming two of L.A.’s most popular queer club nights.

“It’s a political, spiritual, philosophical look at modern society — the information age,” Hoffman adds. “It’s an anthropological look at the absurd current state of affairs. It’s focused yet unhinged, self-reflective, observant, brash, tongue-in-cheek, serious yet playful. Excavations and observations of the mind of an anxiously attached, overthinking, spiritual human.”

Co-produced with David Scott Stone, “No Nostalgia” reads like something from the information age, too — 14 fast-moving post-punk soundbites, narrated in raw deadpan by Hoffman. She’s joined in the quartet by bassist Cristy Michel, drummer Christy Greenwood and synth player Sara Rivas.

On the occasion of the album release, Agender has twinned two singles into a music video directed by Amanda Lovejoy Street. “Agender’s latest two-for-one video explores what an experimental video game on attachment styles might be. The first video follows lead singer Romy the ‘Dismissive’ as she tries to avoid being caught by Claire [Woolner], the ‘Preoccupied,’” Street explains, adding that the second video “propels Romy into an abstract womb space, aka the origin of her attachment style. We move between Romy navigating the smothering ‘wombs’ and into a stylized relationship space where we see the attachment dynamic between her and Claire continue to play out – one where real intimacy is never achieved. George Haas from Mettagroup acts as a ‘therapist’ to narrate and witness.”

||| Watch: The videos for “Trouble & Desire” and “Womb 2 Wound”