Good Morning tackle Scott Morrison’s ‘prevailing rhetoric’
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17.09.2021

Good Morning tackle Scott Morrison’s ‘prevailing rhetoric’

Good Morning

Naarm / Melbourne indie-folk duo Good Morning share new single 'Burning', taken from their forthcoming album Barnyard, out this Oct 22 via Polyvinyl.

Following Good Morning’s return single ‘Country’ comes “part Tweedy part Taxman” track ‘Burning’, as the duo attempt to capture “the sense of dread felt by many across the nation and beyond”.

With lounge piano chords, Liam and Stefan ruminate on existentialism, markers of success and purpose, to the climate crisis, before reaching its pre-chorus: “Some folks will swim and some folks will drown / Me I just hold onto to whatever I’ve found.”

What you need to know

  • Good Morning have just released new single ‘Burning’
  • It’s a politically charged rumination on existentialism
  • It’s from forthcoming album Barnyard

Stay up to date with what’s happening in Melbourne here.

“The lyrics for the song were written in the middle of recording at the end of 2019,” Liam says.

“We had been touring America for a month and a bit and then were doing a little recording in Chicago. The whole time we’d been looking back at Australia and you could just tell that the upcoming summer was going to be fucked.

“It was only September/October and already the fire season had begun and heat records were being broken all the time. There was an impending sense of doom that within a matter of weeks was completely justified.

“In Australia, there is this prevailing rhetoric coming from Scott Morrison and the like that in the midst of a crisis isn’t the time to be talking about climate change or our country’s coal addiction, and that to do so would somehow be opportunistic or shallow.

“So when is the right time when the crisis is never-ending? When can we talk about it when both sides of our federal politics live in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry, their silence and compliance bought while the clock ticks? There’s a necessary numbness that sets in as an occasional coping mechanism for being alive in this present moment. If you felt it all, all the time, you’d be crushed. This song isn’t an endorsement of complacency, but rather an admission that sometimes you need to disassociate for a minute before you can face up to the moment.”

With ‘Burning’s release comes an animated collage video, created and directed by Carolyn Hawkins.

“I stuck with a washed out colour palette – I was thinking about the 2020 bushfires and all the smog and hot concrete,” she says.

“The song also got me thinking about how we try to make sense of the world and cobble together meaning in such confusing, chaotic and troubling times. I wanted to play with images of deconstruction and reconstruction to explore how humans build all these systems – whether it’s politics or the built environment or our own personal worldview – but at the end of the day it’s all so fragile and can so easily be dismantled. I had to be resourceful as it wasn’t easy to go out and get materials with shops shut, but this forced me to think outside the box and look to other methods of creating source material.

“I printed out a lot of images of Brutalist architecture, people, and textures using my crappy printer, and then created a few hand-drawn textures using whatever I had lying around.”

Barnyard is out October 22, pre-order it HERE. ‘Burning’ is out now, buy/stream it HERE.