Black Eyes - Hostile Design 12" record

Black Eyes - Hostile Design 12" record

"On “Hostile Design,” the band resumes their work as musical chiropractors for the American psyche. Across its six songs, and in less than a half hour, Black Eyes offers percussive tit-for-tat, bounding between dub grooves and in-the-soil rhythms. Bass lines pulse, synthesizers wash, saxophones squeal. And McElroy and Martin-McCormick perform lyrical counterpoint, trading images, idioms, symbols and scripture — sometimes overlapping like dueling street preachers.

The pair conjure images of D.C. Metro lines and holes drilled into heads; consider the sacred and profane; and nod to medieval poems and fragments of traditional songs from Greece, Gaza and Haiti. During the writing process, the pair found the shape of the vocals and filled them with lyrics. Sometimes words bubbled up during practice and could be hard to shake — a source of frustration and inspiration.

“It’s a cool clue, because they point to an interpretation, but also lead you into an interpretive headspace, like a clue into what I want to sing about,” Martin-McCormick says. “It’s always something that’s resonant, but it’s finding out what that resonance is pointing toward.”

On “Hostile Design,” those lyrics — like the ones on the band’s first two albums — match music that is anxious, urgent, meditative and insistent. The words offer oblique takes on observations and experiences that offer dynamic lyricism, not didactic lectures about geopolitical realities. But Black Eyes was born and resuscitated in D.C., a place to which the band is inextricably linked, in the same way that “Hostile Design” — which was recorded the weekend after the 2024 presidential election — is tied to this moment.

“Being back involved in this community of music is for me, personally, incredibly empowering. It broadens the love for all that I have and, and I think, maybe naively, is partially how we’re all going to get through this bulls---,” McElroy says." - Chris Kelly