Art seems to always reflect the oddity of times that most starkly contrast normality - such as the onset of the surrealist art movement in response to the horrors of World War One, or the birth of political and protest music with the release of Bing Crosby’s ‘Brother, Can you Spare a Dime?’ amidst the uncertainty of the Great Depression. These shifts to the stability of our day-to-day existence, though scary, cause a need or opportunity to create and view the world differently.

Once again, we are living in truly strange and surreal times - which creates a trying yet pertinent backdrop for Soft Rubbish to release their long-forthcoming debut album Millennial Pink.

Soft Rubbish are a Melbourne-based post-punk/psychedelic rock outfit, comprised of members of other local acts such as Love of Diagrams, Ciggie Witch and Lovers of the Black Bird. After years in the making, the band are releasing Millennial Pink this May - a 14-track record made up of seven songs on the A-Side with the same seven flipped and played in reverse as the B-Side. The result is a strange, symmetrical product designed to mirror the unusual world we live in and spark questions regarding what we are presented and how we consume.

Conceived prior to the onset of COVID-19, the release couldn’t be more timely now. Speaking of the concept, band leader Julie Montan elaborates - “why we've decided to release the album both forwards and in reverse is a story in itself which I'll sum up in a Haiku - not that I need to expend 17 syllables when the metaphor is so obvious. A reflexive necessity to expirate after our so-called great civilisation has ceaselessly breathed capitalism and industrialisation IN for so many years of exponential growth without factoring in entropy or the transformational state of the out breath to restore balance. To unload its lungs of dangerous levels of toxic - everything. Our album is balanced, it breathes in and out. Political poetry is first intelligible, then unintelligible Eastern Experimentalism; a yin/yang, microcosmic comment on the greater schism that has caused everything from Covid-19 to the war in Syria. I think you will like Side A of Millennial Pink, but you will love Side B.”

Today we’ve been given the opportunity to premiere ‘Hsibbur Tfos’, which as implied by the title, is found on the reversed B-Side. But beyond the circumstantial and poetic depth behind Soft Rubbish’s artistic ambitions, the actual song they have made as a result genuinely sounds great in its warped state - as if it exists independently of the song it mirrors.

Just as the band explain that Side-B is to represent breathing out, ‘Hsibbur Tfos’ feels as if something unrecognisable is pouring out of us as the psychedelic guitars pulsate into the distance, and we’re unsettled further through heavy juxtaposition, as Montan’s nonsensical punk delivery contrast moments of ethereal bliss reminiscent of Beach House’s dream-pop. Like the era we are living in, the track feels alien, linked to our past but both new and strange whilst beautiful and hopeful. 

The video embraces a deliberately ethereal and lo-fi visual aesthetic to compliment the surrealism of the music, whilst symbolically highlighting the limited resources we now have at our disposal. Built on hazy old clips of the band performing and travelling, as well as shots of passing clouds, winding roads and other artefacts from a more free time, the result is a visual piece that transports the viewer to a murky world that could have been built by David Lynch. Projected behind a masked Montan performing chaotically in her home, the clip amounts to an iconic representation of the quarantine era and our confusion, manic unrest, and conflicting desires of safety and freedom.

Releasing this track first presents both sides as of equal importance, rather than the reverse simply being an edit of the original. Forcing us to view each version as distinct and to question its true form, and further pushing the band's mission to promote skepticism regarding the reality of what we are told and given. When the time comes, it’s likely that hearing ‘Hsibbur Tfos’ in its original form as ’Soft Rubbish’ will create a dreamlike uncanny valley feeling, reinforcing this desire to question reality and truth - not unlike the feeling of walking through the city centre in our now distorted world.