Photo by Jessica Gurewitz
Before… all of this — all of everything, you know what I mean — Native Sun were catching up on sleep (probably) after a west coast tour with White Reaper and gearing up to play a bunch of showcases at SXSW. They’d just recently released their first single with Grand Jury (“Juarez”), and were putting on packed, sweaty, loud, peanut buttery shows in their home base of Brooklyn.
As pertinent to the times as this second single “Government Shutdown” is, it was written in a pre-covid world while the band was making their way through the frigid pre-winter of Chicago. It really makes sense that this all was written in that environment, with its economy of words and in its bashing brutal and quickness to the punch.
The video, made by POND creative, shows flashes of images that are either inherently political or that have been made political by the missteps of the American experiment. It dips back into history but recalls sentiment that’s still pertinent. It’s loud, it’s simple, it’s apt. It’s a song that, if played live in front of a crowd that’s heard it even once, everyone would go wild because in its simplicity it is unifying and gratifying.