This Thursday, the 18th, Placebo released the music video for the single “Surrounded By Spies,” which is part of the band's highly anticipated eighth studio album, Never Let Me Go . The album is scheduled for release on March 25, 2022, and arrives nine years after Loud Like Love . Access the pre-save and pre-order here.
In September, Placebo released “Beautiful James ,” their first single in five years. “Surrounded By Spies” arrives with a message about civil liberties and a sense of claustrophobia caused by the constant feeling of surveillance coming from new technologies.
According to Brian Molko , a cut-up technique was used in the song popularized by David Bowie . “It’s a true story told through a lens of paranoia, complete disgust for the values of modern society and the deification of surveillance capitalism,” said Molko. “The narrator is at the end of his ropes, hopeless and afraid, completely at odds with our newfound progress and the god of money.”
All this fear and suffocating feeling of panic was based on a real experience lived by Molko, who discovered that his neighbors were spying on him, apparently in the name of political bias.
“I then began to reflect on the countless ways in which our privacy has been eroded and stolen since the introduction of CCTV cameras around the world, which now employ racist facial recognition technologies,” she says. “The rise of the internet and mobile phones, which has turned virtually every user into a paparazzo and spectator in their own life, and how we all offer personal information to huge multinational corporations whose sole intention is to exploit us.”
Watch the music video for “Surrounded By Spies”:
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