Melbourne robo-punks Dr Sure's Unusual Practice are on fire in 2021, releasing their second rocking single 'How Can Anybody Be Sober These Days?'
Hitting you at breakneck speed, ‘How Can Anybody Be Sober These Days?’ is the follow up to the band’s barnstorming single ‘Infinite Growth’ released earlier this year.
The video is a glimpse at the band’s forthcoming album Remember the Future? (out November 5 on Marthouse Records), and finds Dr Sure in door-to-door “snake oil salesman” mode, grifting the self-medicating zeitgeist with a remedy for every modern ill.
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Band leader Dougal Shaw (also known as Marthouse label don and guitarist for Cash Savage and the Last Drinks) describes ‘How Can Anybody Be Sober These Days?’ as “a tongue-in-cheek commentary on life under neo-liberal capitalism, where productivity outweighs fulfilment. It’s about governments allowing the poisons that numb us enough that we don’t ask too many questions, but not so much that we’re no longer deemed useful,” Shaw explains.
“Underneath it all it’s about finding your own intoxication and coping mechanisms, whether that’s writing songs, or a long walk in nature, or a puppy to love,” he says.
Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice emerged from the Melbourne underground as a potent force and clarion voice with their 2019 debut The West, followed by 2020’s fiery (pun intended) EPs, Scomo Goes to Hawaii and While Aus Burns.
Their powerful new album, Remember the Future? is a 31-minute whammy of 10 propulsive robo-punk anthems which document the dystopian absurdity of our times, informed by Shaw’s innate hopefulness and staunch belief in a better future, along with the satirical edge that prompted Monster Children to dub him “a musical Betoota Advocate”.
Dr Sure’s Unusual Practice is a post-modern, post-punk, post-cynicism embodiment of Woody Guthrie’s folk polemic of “singing the news” — expounded by Bob Dylan, Public Enemy and countless successors, but rooted in the oldest musical traditions of recounting and pamphleteering historical events.
As Shaw explains, his songwriting is lyrically “reacting to whatever’s dominating the news feed, it’s all catastrophes and conspiracies. I’m trying to make some sense out of it, or at least document it. That’s my unusual practice.”
Check out our recent feature interview with the band here.
