Nietzsche famously said that God had long since checked out, leaving no forwarding address. Now we’re all loitering in the glowing vestibule of our own making, lit by OLED screens instead of stained glass. In America circa now, everybody’s a little messiah with a front-facing camera, canonizing their own reflection in real time, chasing likes like absolution. No pulpit required—just a ring light and the nerve to believe your own press. Why swallow some preacher’s sweat-soaked sermon when you can sanctify yourself, body and bandwidth, a feedback loop of self-worship—half revelation, half peep show, and maybe nobody’s even there.
Battery Licker’s Don’t Look Away comes crawling out of Dallas, where you are still more likely to run into a ten-gallon hat than a goth band, which makes the project a fine little anomaly in cowboy country. They bottle the restless rebel-youth charge of the 80s and 90s, then lace it with industrial bite, post-punk pressure, goth-rock gloom, noise damage, and grunge rot. Imagine The Damned and Type O Negative raising a delinquent child on the languid spoken-word weirdness of Southern Culture on the Skids and the Butthole Surfers, and you are near the right gutter. Don’t Look Away itself sounds like a busted sermon broadcast from a cracked phone in a motel bathroom: the former “new generation” reporting back from the ruins, older now, angrier maybe, but also relieved to discover the confusion was communal all along.
The song comes from the upcoming album New American Jesus, and the title is no polite metaphor. Nietzsche’s corpse is somewhere in the corner, smoking and watching America replace the dead deity with the selfie stick. God is gone, so the feed becomes the altar; the influencer becomes the idol; the algorithm becomes scripture with worse prose.
The central figure is Warhol’s fifteen-minute prophecy boiled down to fifteen seconds, a self-declared saint with Travis Bickle’s wounded glare and a smartphone where the weapon used to be. Fame here feels cheap, desperate, disposable, less a crown than a paper hat from some fast-food monarchy of the damned.
Visually, director and editor Chris Northrup keeps the video in a grainy black-and-white industrial register, nodding to Judas Priest’s Painkiller while letting the slow opening drift toward early Gregg Araki: bored kids, bad rooms, beautiful doom, America with the lights half-dead. The deliberately lousy voiceover is a smart wound in the polish, a crooked human fingerprint pressed against a culture allergic to blemish.
Shot by Northrup, Denny Saldivar, and Brian Ryden, with costume design by Ryden, the clip stars the band and Saldivar as witnesses to their own cheap apocalypse. Don’t Look Away works because it knows the joke is already on us, and still has the nerve to laugh with its mouth full of blood.
Watch below:
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The post If You Gaze Into the Feed… — Dallas Industrial Punk Outfit Battery Licker Shares Video for “Don’t Look Away” appeared first on Post-Punk.com.
