Algiers are fed up with the way things have been going in America lately. In a gripping new video for the latest single “Cleveland” from their just-released album The Underside Of Power, the band decided to reach back into the past in order to enlighten those in the present about the challenges still being faced by America’s minorities.
Over a gripping soundtrack of frenetic industrial sounds and soulful vocals, the band displays the the Black Panthers’ ten points program, alternated with the names of black citizens that have been killed by police officers over the last several years, including Roosevelt Pernel, Tamir Rice, and Sandra Bland to name a few. The video itself was shot on the site where an NYPD officer killed Eric Garner.
“Just being in a band and traveling around, you are kind of in tune to these negative attitudes that are always there,” lead singer Franklin James Fisher told us recently. “You can feel it constantly bubbling under the false, cellophane facade of liberalism.” Adding, “Our parent’s generation had really good music And it was all about how people were just so sick of it. It wasn’t a game, this was peoples’ lives. And it addressed real issues… But why can’t you have something that realizes it’s a miracle we’re still here while still talking about what’s going on?”
You can watch Algiers’ powerful new video ‘Cleveland’ above.
