Two years removed from release of their critically-acclaimed sophomore LP Harmlessness, Connecticut’s The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die are back with a new lineup and a new record. Always Foreign was written in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, a moment that brought a lot of unfamiliar anger into the band’s music and songwriting.
With the latest Always Foreign track “Marine Tigers” and the coinciding video, the band took inspiration from the content of vocalist David F. Bello’s father José Bello’s new book of the same name, a book the addresses xenophobia through Bello’s story of coming to New York from Puerto Rico almost seventy years ago, as well as the prejudice or discrimination that comes with it. “Marine Tiger was the ship that carried people from Puerto Rico, and so the white people in New York started calling all the Puerto Rican people ‘Marine Tigers,’” Bello said in a statement. “The idea of being named after something that you’re not excited about ties into that feeling of always being foreign.”
For the track’s epic seven-minute video component, director Ryan Sheehy depicts a man with a third arm facing the shame and fearful anger that comes from the expressions of discrimination from those around him. Onlookers stare at him with disgust and confusion as he walks by, leading to many scenes of of solidarity and evident inner turmoil. Check it out above.
Always Foreign is out September 29th on Epitaph Records. Pre-order it here and catch The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die on tour this Fall.
