We’ll take any excuse to write about Greyhaven, and thankfully they’ve given us a good one today, releasing a new music video for “Sweet Machine”. The Louisville based four piece of Brent Mills, Johnny Muench, Nick Spencer, and Ethan Spray released Empty Black last month via Equal Vision Records. The album scored full marks from us in our review, and its unpredictable and fierce self continues to be on high rotation.
Premiered via Kerrang, the video for “Sweet Machine” visually captures the discomfort of manipulation the song expresses, along with a distance of science-fiction. The track is the first of the album and as an invitation into Empty Black, serves as an eerie shove into a violent unknown and a virtual peeling back of a curtain we may not have tried to see behind.
Alarming and unnerving, “Sweet Machine” begins chaotically, courtesy of thrashed beats, guitar complexity, and vocals that are upfront and honest, yet unsettlingly measured in sharing their story. Frantic cramming of syllables, guitars swerving out of control, erratic beats. Attention is grabbed throughout, in this track which had me feel like a puppet; blindly obedient to manipulative forces. Immersed in the song, it’s as if my puppet head couldn’t move and I’m watching the world in front of me be set alight, with the fire is threatening to rage out of control. Subtle yet powerful is the lyric shift in the outro from ‘our world’ to ‘your world’; a sobering disconnect from what’s going on, despite chaos ensuing.
“So far removed just like you wanted to be”
In vocalist Brent Mills’ words, “The song is about recognizing you’re pulled into the system in some fashion, whether you like it or not. Somewhere down the line you’re a link in the chain. So we just had fun with this concept in the video, trying to create dreamlike representations of these ideas and here it is, the sweet machine.”
With Mills shown wired up, unconscious, and prone in the video, while he believes he’s freely exploring something genuine, the concept of manipulation is taken to its limits. Watch the new video below, and be sure to take some time with Empty Black as a whole.
