A title like "Mayday!!! Fiesta Fever" throws down a bit of a gauntlet when it comes to making a video. And rest assured that AWOLNATION's clip for the track — premiering exclusively below from its upcoming Angel Miners and the Lightning Riders album — lives up to the task.
Directed by Ravi Dhar, the video finds group founder and frontman Aaron Bruno and his bandmates partying hearty — in a dollar store, amongst piñatas, on stage and with guest vocalist Alex Ebert of Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros. "It reminds me of the feel of a lot of the music videos I watched from the '90s, growing up — the Beastie Boys and some '90s hip-hop videos that were hugely impactful for me," Bruno, who spends part of "Mayday!!! Fiesta Fever" being wheeled around in a shopping cart in homage to Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees" video, tells Billboard. "It's a reminder that music can be really lighthearted. A lot of artists get carried away in taking themselves really seriously, but the music we're playing, especially this time, is supposed to be really playful and fun, and I think (the video) really captures that."
Interestingly, the fun component of Angel Miners, AWOLNATION's fourth studio album and follow-up to 2018's Here Come the Runts, came from very heavy circumstances.
Bruno and the band were on the road touring, playing in Phoenix, when the deadly Woolsey Fire ripped through Malibu, where he resides, during November of 2018. "My wife calls me at 7 in the morning one day and was like, 'What do you want me to get?' — she was evacuating and filling the car," says Bruno, whose house was damaged but not destroyed. "I couldn't wrap my head around it, y'know? It was a heavy, heavy experience — which is an understatement, I know. I felt really helpless." Bruno — who asked his wife to grab two guitars and some lyric journals — did lose his home studio to the fire, but he came to find the silver lining in what happened.
"It felt like a little bit of a rebirth of sorts, a restart," he explains. "Before that I felt like I was going through some different changes, and what happened gave me an opportunity to do that. So I approached (Angel Miners) as if it was my first record. I wanted to act as if I had no success before and really prove myself all over again. It was accidentally extremely inspiring." The result on Angel Miners is what Bruno calls "kind of a concept album, a good, old-fashioned story of good and evil" that nevertheless has a more buoyant tone than what he's previously pursued with AWOLNATION.
"There's so much beauty because of everything I've gone through," Bruno says. "It's important for me to share that I feel so incredibly lucky that amongst all the chaos and disaster that I didn't lose my house, like so many people did, and I don't take that lightly. I feel incredibly lucky. And gearing up to make a fourth record I think I had gained a new perspective on what some of my strengths were and what some of my glaring weaknesses have been, and getting to that place has been inspiring, too."
AWOLNATION played the album's first single, "The Best," at the NHL All-Star Game last month, and he's looking forward to rolling more into the shows when AWOLNATION hits the road in earnest during the spring and summer. "The songs feel pretty good," Bruno says. "I'm lucky to have a great band to do this with. With these guys the worst I can be is pretty good."
