By Charlie Maybee
Raleigh, North Carolina based electronica musician, Animalweapon! (aka Patrick Cortes), is back with a moody music video for “Deserve”, which sees him wandering the streets of a city after a night of solo drinking. It foreshadows the new upcoming album Set of Constraints, released today on April 15, 2022 on Polychromatic Records.
Much like the music, the visual feels purposefully weighted and slowed down giving us elongated stretches where we just see Cortes lost in his thoughts. Among the various background characters is a woman who caresses his back as she passes by, but the call goes unanswered as we watch her wait with a martini in one hand and a seemingly endless amount of time in the other.
After paying his bill, Cortes begins his hazy, wandering adventure through the city as the lyrics “Why did I think I deserve this” vibrate through the space implying that there is regret for not answering the woman’s call at the bar. “How long? How much is enough?”, he asks himself musically. While it’s not immediately clear if there is some pretextual event that has led to this state of self-sabotaging a possible good time, there’s clearly a high level of remorse or emotional injury from something that happened in the past – most likely with a lover, but like the ethereal synthesizers, it’s just vague enough to keep you guessing while the drum and bass keep you on the hook.
“A lot of this record is a marker of a transitional period of my life”, Cortes notes, “ I didn’t realize it at the time, but my last record Tyrannosaurus was very much a representation of a pretty low stretch, mental health wise,” says Cortes. “A lot of this album was me acknowledging that I can mitigate that if I actually put in the work and starting to. I still write music with enough room for interpretation so that people can connect it to whatever they’re feeling, but ideally, I hope it resonates with anyone who is working on themselves or ‘in the cocoon’ so to speak.”
“Deserve” is available on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, and the accompanying music video is also available on YouTube. Animalweapon!’s new full-length album Set of Constraints available now, and “Deserve” is on our Alchemical Records Multigenre Mixture playlist on Spotify and YouTube.
Charlie Maybee is a dancer, musician, educator, and writer based in Charleston, South Carolina who currently teaches with the Dance Program at the College of Charleston. His primary work as an artist is with his performing collective, Polymath Performance Project, through which he makes interdisciplinary performance art that centers tap dance as the primary medium of expression and research. He also currently plays rhythm guitar for the Charleston-based punk band, Anergy, and releases music as a solo artist under the name Nox Eterna.
Join the Alchemical Records Street Team to promote these and other artists, live music, and music community organizations & events while receiving cool perks from artists throughout the region.
Recent Articles March 21st. A day that I will always think of amazing album releases. DC-based musician, producer, and singer-songwriter, Rachel Levitin, released Witty Banter
Alchemical Records is a Washington, D.C. based music publication. We cover the Washington, D.C., Baltimore and Richmond, VA metro area music scenes, including band interviews, articles about your favorite musicians, new music and concert dates.
