Music / Premieres
Video Premiere:
screensaver - Living In An Instant
Words by James Lynch
Friday 15th January, 2021
Originally released as part of the second edition of Blow Blood Records’ A Long Time Alone compilation, today Melbourne four-piece screensaver have shared a haphazard new clip for their synth-heavy post-punk blitz ‘Living In An Instant’.
The second track to be shared from the emerging synth-punk group, ‘Living In An Instant’ plays like the restless sibling to screensaver’s debut single ‘Strange Anxiety’. Where ’Strange Anxiety’ developed around a simmering and unsettling drum machine groove, ‘Living In An Instant’ is immediately more agitated.

Powered by a driving backbeat that thunders incessantly for the track’s duration, ‘Living In An Instant’ expands with a tangle of soaring synthesiser and wirey guitar, before Krystal Maynard emerges from the sprawl to pelt us with her sharp vocals, her icy delivery cutting through the pulsating instrumentation as she spits each line out at us. Written last year throughout lockdown, the band explain the song is “loosely about spontaneity and impulsivity, perhaps an unconscious response to the repetition, monotony and routine that crept in during the year”, and despite the track’s murky production, there’s an undeniable sense of this nervousness bubbling beneath from start to end - an atmosphere that’s compounded by the urgency of Krystal’s vocal performance, until the tension finally amounts and the track runs itself into the ground.

To accompany the single, screensaver have shared a disorientating new clip for ‘Living In An Instant’ with us today. Matching the track’s chaotic energy, the clip plays like an abstracted collage, that cuts grainy vintage footage together with enigmatic pop-art portraits of the band completing household tasks. Created by Scott Marrinan and inspired by “70s screen printing, dadaism and the reinterpretation of household objects as art and Andy Warhol’s pop art aesthetic”, there’s a striking elusiveness that comes from the warped mundanity of the visuals, especially so as the track races along thrillingly underneath.

‘Living In An Instant’ is available as part of Blow Blood Records’ A Long Time Alone 2 compilation, which you can grab on limited cassette here. Follow screensaver below to keep up to date with everything else they’ve got on the go.