“Division is the mission.”
screensaver’s latest single, Division, is a synthpunk extravaganza wired for our collective calamity: a blast of motorik momentum that turns tribal panic, poisoned politics, and the ache for connection into something tense enough to dance to and ugly enough to believe. The Melbourne five-piece locks into a Krautrock push and lets the rest of the machinery misbehave: forceful synths, bass like a civic alarm, drums with no patience for your precious little feelings, and guitars that slash across the track with the clean nastiness of broken glass under fluorescent light.
Krystal Maynard recites the lyrics like the latest dispatch from a culture choking on its own splintered team allegiances. The song’s refrain “Division is the mission” cuts deep, because it names division as design rather than accident: a strategy of fracture, distraction, and control hiding in plain sight. Around that line, screensaver builds a song about geopolitical fracture, attention rot, misinformation, environmental collapse, and the cheap tribal costume people wear when they have run out of better ideas.
The band’s own explanation puts the song’s panic in plain terms:
“Thematically, the lyrics hone in on the geopolitical state of the world. As the focus shifts perpetually and our attention is pulled in multiple directions, we’re left a fractured mess. We’re left divided by the distractions, crushed under the weight of a constant downpour of misinformation. The divide widens as we share the same space, the same air, the same earth. The very earth that we’re destroying in parallel as we fight against each other. Division is the mission and the powers that be are succeeding.”
That is the horrorify gag, really. Everybody is trapped in the same room, while half of them are busy setting fire to the curtains and the other half are calling it discourse.
The song’s sound has the clipped, bug-eyed intelligence of Devo, the political bite of The Clash, the sleek unease of Heaven 17, and the wired melodic twitch of XTC, though screensaver never sinks into costume-party pastiche. Christopher Stephenson, James Beck, Dorian Vary, Jonnine Nokes, and Maynard know how to make that synth-driven tension move. Julian Cue’s recording and mix keep every instrument close enough to bruise, while Casey Rice’s mastering gives the track a bright, hard finish, like metal warmed by catastrophe.
The video, conceptualized by Maynard and directed and shot by James Beck, throws the song into a sick little cinema of social breakdown, examining “our allegiances, tribalism and the dichotomy of the individual vs the collective,” along with “the existential dread that haunts us all.” Its neo-noir dystopian grime and Romero-Fulci body-cluster chaos makes perfect sense beside the track’s thesis: groups form, groups splinter, and people drift between disconnection and disengagement while still yearning for contact. You might also spot a few familiar faces from the local Melbourne music scene among the pack. The zombies here are citizens, consumers, believers, skeptics, doomscrollers, neighbours. Nobody needs to eat flesh when they can chew through reality instead.
“They’re not flesh eaters,” the band adds. “They are humans hungry for connection.”
Watch the video for “Division” below:
Released digitally through Poison City Records, Division is screensaver’s first new music since Three Lens Approach. It comes on like a public-service announcement from the end of the escalator. Tight, smart, agitated, and mean in all the right places, it positions screensaver as one of the sharper bands dragging post-punk discipline into synth-driven disorder.
Listen to Division below and order the single here.
screensaver UK Tour Dates:
26 May — Sheffield, UK — Delicious Clam
27 May — Bristol, UK — The Croft
28 May — London, UK — The Shacklewell Arms
29 May — Manchester, UK — Big Hands
30 May — Brighton, UK — The Green Door Store
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