KennyHoopla isn’t hesitant to say what motivates him, and it’s clear in his new gritty, catchy single “NEW AMERICA//,” released today, as the catchy indie rock song offers a snapshot of a country that calls itself “new” yet still falls back into the same old cycles of inequality. He criticizes online political discourse, saying, “you and your friends fight the government on the internet,” as part of a broader view of people who know so much yet can do little to change it.
In the chorus, Kenny critiques the mask of real growth in society, saying that in a “New America,” progress is merely “a hit-and-run.” The issues of gentrification are also discussed, with lines such as “The profit’s good / well, there goes the neighborhood” poking fun at profit motives. At the end, the repeated, numbed-out outro mantra of “We had fun” makes it clear that Kenny’s goal was to make it less of a straightforward protest track and more of a portrait of a culture that knows it is stuck and that the only thing it can do is keep moving forward. The track closes by painting the younger generation as self-aware yet selectively blind, “sympathiz[ing] / with two hands covering [their] eyes”.
All of the seemingly pessimistic imagery discussed from start to finish does not take away from the fact that the song is an earworm, filled with tension in both the words and the sonics, with Albert Hammond Jr. of The Strokes’ guitar work heard throughout the track, which amplifies the anxiety and urgency found in the lyrics. The compressed, disco-esque drums, fuzzed-out bass, and pretty synths combine to create a track that can only be described as a Trojan horse, a highly catchy indie-rock soon-to-be anthem carrying a pointed, uncomfortable message straight to your head.
Listen to “NEW AMERICA//” by KennyHoopla and Albert Hammond Jr., out now.
