Buffalo-based hardcore band Every Time I Die shares the powerful video for their latest single Map Change at NPR. The track appears on their 2016 album Low Teens, which was nominated for the Alternative Press Music Award for Album of the Year.
Revealing the band’s cerebral sensibilities, the Map Change video offers a cinéma vérité look at the hometown of vocalist Keith Buckley, guitarists Andy Williams and Jordan Buckley, drummer Daniel Davison, and bassist Steve Micciche. In creating the video, director Kyle Thrash spent a mid-winter week in Buffalo and emerged with a bleak yet beautiful, Herzog-esque portrait of American despair.
With help from the band, Thrash documented the everyday lives of the city’s locals and found his subjects open to sharing their most intimate moments. As a result, Map Change gives an up-close look at life in trailer parks and strip clubs, at butcher shops and Bingo games. Moving from abandoned churches to high school wrestling matches to roadside fistfights with a whiplash urgency, the video captures the dead-of-winter feeling of the world quite possibly coming to an end.
With its furious energy and undeniable melody, Map Change fully embodies the emotional intensity of Low Teens. Recorded with producer/engineer Will Putney (Acacia Strain, Body Count, Exhumed), Every Time I Die’s eighth full-length came to life after a moment of major crisis for the band’s frontman. While on tour in Toronto in December 2015, Buckley got a call that his wife had been hospitalised with a life-threatening pregnancy complication, and immediately raced home to be by her side. Although both wife and daughter survived, Buckley notes that the experience led to a sense of “abject helplessness, and that entirely new feeling opened up a lot of questions about place and purpose.”
Along with recognising Low Teens in the Album of the Year category, the Alternative Press Music Awards have nominated Jordan Buckley for Best Guitarist and Keith Buckley for Best Vocalist.
