Video premiere: Near Beer, ‘Mixtape Generation’

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Near Beer

L.A. trio Near Beer are charging toward this summer’s release of their self-titled debut album with all the restraint of kids who are first in line at a kegger. Those were the days, right?

This week, they pour out the second single, “Mixtape Generation,” a fast-and-furious punk-rocker whose shout-sung lyrics and shark-teeth guitars speak to losing one’s youth in the most youthful way possible. It’s another of Near Beer’s fond (and not so) remembrances of being young and wide-eyed — while revealing a self-awareness that it’s coming from, as frontman Joey Siara jokes, “aging indie rockers pining for the glory of a perfect power-pop tune while the rest of their friends become responsible, child-rearing adults.”

Siara, who’s joined in the band by Brent Stranathan and Jeremy Levy, says of the new single: “‘Mixtape Generation’ has the caffeine pop-punkery of our teenage selves, but maybe the existential weight of being 20 years older. It drifts from nostalgia to paranoia, comes undone in the bridge, and yes, it was inspired by eating some ‘magical’ cookie, thinking that death was imminent, but making it to the other side to see how ridiculous the whole experience was — which feels like the appropriate metaphor for being in a band.”

And if making it to some semblance of adulthood had its share of bumps and bruises, director Matt Wyatt’s wry video for “Mixtape Generation” takes the journey a step further. Parisa Fakhri and Eric Toms portray newlyweds whose nuptials get bloody.

“We talked a while about the canned nostalgia of these kinds of wedding videos,” Siara says, “and he ran with this idea. He found a nice angle on the whole ‘we’re in this together’ theme.”

||| Watch: The video for “Mixtape Generation”

||| Live: Near Beer headline the Moroccan Lounge on July 16. Tickets.

||| Previously: “Yelling at a Dog”