Singled Out: Dust City Opera's The Unkind

Keavin Wiggins | 02-13-2022

Photo by Gracie Meier courtesy Press Here

Dust City Opera recently release their new single/video "The Unkind", from their forthcoming album, "Alien Summer", and to celebrate we asked frontman Paul Hunton to tell us about the track. Here is the story:

I'd like to start by saying thank you to Keavin and antiMusic for featuring our latest single, "The Unkind." It's great to be talking about this song as we approach the full album release for Alien Summer on March 4th.

"The Unkind" is track one on the new album. It's sort of a Halloween horror fantasy and it's about a murderous plant race that awakes every generation, kills everyone, and then goes back to sleep. "The Unkind" was just a phrase that tumbled out of my mouth while I was playing with a melody, and it immediately struck me as the name of some monstrous plant race that comes out of hibernation every so often to prey on humanity. Fun, right?

We knew we wanted to do a music video for this release and the video was actually compiled and edited by our manager, Sydney Counce. It features some teens, the few survivors of The Unkind apocalypse, playing a "hide and seek" type game. We see flashbacks to some creepy plants, and everything is overgrown. Seems like people dig it and Sydney is excited to do some more videos for us.

This song is really different than anything we've put out before. I mean, we've always had a dark undertone to our music, but when we started out we were delivering songs under the umbrella of Americana. Now, we've been saying we're this kind of gothic grunge orchestra, if you will. Opera suggests an epic drama. We've applied the grandeur of opera to a rock band. It's hard to describe but once you hear it, you kind of go, "Oh yeah, I see what you mean."

Through the transition from a "folk" band to a "rock" band, we've kept our same instrumentation and bent the rules of what roles these instruments, like clarinet, trombone, and accordion are capable of. "The Unkind" is this rowdy horror romp, with all of those fun instrumental textures at play. Clara is actually playing the electric organ on this one. A first for us, I think. It's similar to the accordion she's normally laying down, but the spooky tone of the organ gets us a step closer to that horror vibe we're going for. Travis gives us that trombone that people who know us have come to expect on every song. It's still us, but in a reimagined way.

Hearing is believing. Now that you know the story behind the song, listen and watch for yourself below and learn more about the album here