The music landscape has been much quieter post-Y2k without Violent Femmes, or at least less violent and feminine. The band’s most recent full-length album, Freak Magnet, was released in February 2000, and between then and now, Violent Femmes have been alternately busy and inactive, going on hiatuses and tours (and recording a cover of the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song, for which we are grateful). Thankfully, the band returned with an EP for Record Store Day in April, a fun and jaunty four-track effort titled Happy New Year, which was recorded on New Year’s Eve 2014 and marked their first original recorded output in 15 years.
Thankfully, the Violent Femmes story doesn’t stop there: Nerdist is excited to premiere the band’s new music video for one of the EP’s tracks, “Good For/At Nothing”, which you can check out above.
The video, which was conceived and animated by Harley Hefford, features a mix of live-action shots and early-ebaumsworld.com-like Flash animation that very well could have been drawn in Microsoft Paint on a Windows 95 desktop. The loose visuals plays nicely with the free-wheeling nature of the song, though, and we are most enamored with the smiling, juggling, guitar-playing loaf of bread.
The band spoke to Rolling Stone when they debuted the EP, saying, “Happy to have some new recordings for people that have loved our music, and would be honored to have a few new ears hear us for the first time too.” They added that they plan on recording more material together, so here’s to more music, and hopefully more wacky music videos, to come.
The band’s upcoming appearance on The Nerdist Podcast is also something to look very forward to, so be sure to stay tuned for that.
