Last month, Polaris Music Prize nominated group, Super Duty Tough Work, announced their new album, Paradigm Shift, which is due out September 8, 2023 via Next Door Records. A mission statement of sorts, Paradigm Shift is a marker in time, a testament to Super Duty Tough Work’s constantly evolving worldview and assertion of commitment to their art and the traditions from which they’re born.
Today, the band is sharing the new video for “Quiet Strength” from the album which largely explores themes of mental illness and depression, and the juggling of those states while attempting to maintain a career. Opening with a stunning diatribe on survival by the great Audre Lorde, despite being heavy at its core, “Quiet Strength” feels more like floating through the streets, laid out, enveloped in a cloud. In mirroring the ebb and flow ways in which mental illness or bouts of depression can manifest.
“I mean, when I wrote this song, I think even though I was trying to seem optimistic, I was still very much dealing with the grief of losing a number of people who I was quite close to,” says frontman Brendan Grey. “I think that’s a recurring theme on this record that I didn’t really see until it was finished. In my mind, originally, I was like, ‘yeah this record is about opposing the system and partying and showing how fly we are and all that.’ But when I started to listen to a lot of the lyrics, there’s so many references to being sad, and crying and shit, I was like, damn, I was really depressed (laughs). At the same time, I think those are things to some degree that many people can relate to, right? Managing grief can be tricky and everyone copes in different ways, so I wanted to write something that would be familiar and somewhat comforting to anyone who might be listening, while still being personal to me and all my people.”
On the video Grey says, “This was a really fun video to make. This beat always felt like floating to me, like being on a cloud. So that's the vibe we were going for with the video: floating through the streets on a couch/cloud. The couch itself is just kind of a symbol of inactivity or being stuck. I feel that culturally there's the idea of needing to ‘get off the couch and do something!’, like the couch itself is some kind of barrier between realising one's potential or not. Also, we didn't just drive down some random streets, each street was chosen for a specific reason; the street where my great Grandmother lived and where I basically live now, an old apartment block I used to live in, the Arlington bridge, the centre of Winnipeg – Portage and Main. Even the Police Headquarters. Everything is there for a reason, even if just to add some personal meaning for myself or those around me.”
