The new single from Newcastle band, Crux is out. And they’re pretty excited about it. Lead singer Max Houghton sent us some words putting the song into the context of the band’s bigger mission.
The Crux lads. Photo credit: Chris Ord
Alreet! I’m Max from Crux, a Newcastle based alternative rock band.
Crux was born a while ago when me (lead vocals, rhythm guitar, and keyboards) and Jake Waldock (lead guitar) studied at the same sixth form together. After years of experimenting with music and finding our sound, we wanted to keep the band going, but we needed some assistance. After scouring musician forums and holding auditions, we soon recruited Hallam Press (bass) and drummer Joe Reid, completing the Crux line up.
We feel passionate about inspiring change through our music and don’t shy away from talking about real-life global problems; trying to channel everyone’s despair and frustration of the world’s current state into our music.
Living in Dystopia, which some are calling a ‘Working Class Anthem’ is the third and probably our favourite song we’ve released to date. Here’s a bit of background to where it came from.
In my second year at the University of York, I was in a surveillance seminar as part of my Crime and Criminal Justice Studies course. At the time, I was reading the dystopian novels Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. I was convinced our world was far from those I was reading about and used this as an argument to justify surveillance. It didn’t take the seminar leader long to shoot my argument down and open my eyes to the similarities between the world we were living in and those described in these two novels – a scary cocktail of dystopia.
This was back in 2017, and it’s fair to say things have not improved. I wrote the lyrics for Living in Dystopia in late 2018/early 2019 and I think they reflect what we’re living through now more than ever via three minutes of condensed, manic prog rock. (You’ll hear varied influences in there, from Radiohead to Rage Against the Machine.)
The music video was produced by local filmmaker, David Kenny, who perfectly captures the mania – representing a broad range of issues such as mental health, totalitarianism, homelessness, religion, poverty, hunger, unemployment, global warming, mundanity via fast-cutting sequences. We think it’s excellent and complements the song perfectly.
Living in Dystopia artwork
French artist, Alexandre Le Scornet, who is based in Newcastle, created the visually striking artwork for the single. Inspiration was sought from the artwork from Nadine Shah’s album, Love Your Dum and Mad, and also The Guardian’s ‘Inequality… in a photograph’.
The video and the artwork brilliantly capture the main issue we were trying to get across in our third single – inequality.