Irish indie favorites Soda Blonde are delighted to reveal the music video for their latest single ‘Bad Machine’, the first from the band’s upcoming Dream Big album, due for release on September 8th. ‘Bad Machine’ fuses warm vocals with fuzzy synths, bringing a sense of sonic pleasure with its self-acceptance message. Indie pop and vibrant electronica combine to create a song with vigor and excitement.
Soda Blonde has grown tremendously in the years since their debut, and it shows. Whereas 2021’s Small Talk was an anxiety-fueled coming-of-age record about navigating our twenties, Dream Big is a mature awakening to the world at large; one that dives deeper and hits harder than its predecessor.
Dream Big is as much a product of self-reflective reckoning as it is one of submission, and both of these experiences are borne out in its songs. Soda Blonde begins Dream Big by asking what they’re willing to sacrifice in order to achieve their dreams, and as the album continues, they wrestle with the sheer weight of that question.
For this video we wanted to explore the idea of ‘malfunction’. In an age of increasing automation, artificial intelligence etc, it’s easy to imagine the many ways things could go awry. But also, we just wanted to break stuff! Our talented & hardworking production designers built the set in 2 days and we destroyed it in 10 mins of 16mm film.
– Guitarist Adam O’Regan
For Faye O’Rourke and her bandmates (guitarist Adam O’Regan, drummer Dylan Lynch, and bassist Donagh Seaver-O’Leary), music has always been a multifaceted pursuit – a source of entertainment, sure, but even more importantly, a vessel of authenticity. The four have been playing in bands together since their teenage years and had nearly ten years under their belt – notably as Irish indie rock favourites Little Green Cars – before introducing the world to Soda Blonde in 2019.
“I feel like my job is to be as human as possible and to expose all of my innermost thoughts without fear of judgment,” Soda Blonde’s enigmatic frontwoman Faye O’Rourke says. “Not to tell people what’s right or wrong, but just to be vulnerable and allow them to figure that out for themselves.”
Soda Blonde are shooting for the moon, and they may very well land among the stars. Dream Big, the Irish band’s upcoming second studio album, is far more than a collection of catchy and cathartic pop songs; it’s a mantra – a mission statement from four lifelong friends. It’s their promise to themselves, and a message to all who come along for the ride: A reminder that life is precious, fragile, and fleeting, so we might as well dream big and hold nothing back.
Epic in size and intimate in scope, Dream Big holds a microscope in one hand and a mirror in the other as our innermost thoughts and feelings get a soundtrack of their very own. Following two successful introductory EPs (2019’s Terrible Hands and 2020’s Isolation • content), they released their debut album, Small Talk, in 2021. The LP was subsequently nominated for RTÉ’s Choice Music Prize for Album of the Year and received rave reviews from Paste Magazine, Atwood Magazine, and The Irish Times, who called it “a record so articulate and expressive that its title has to be a wry in-joke.”
Dream Big, the upcoming second studio album by Soda Blonde, is due for release on September 8th.
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Feature photo by Patricio Cassinoni
‘Bad Machine’ is out now: https://sodablonde.ffm.to/badmachine
