Air Traffic Control has rolled out a new video for “End of the Road” and it’s a little too ominous for something that was released well before the pandemic. Taken from their fifth album, Great Escapes which was released in October of last year, the song is a bittersweet and cavalier approach to the inevitable moment we all get off the merry-go-round.
If we are preparing for that moment, “End of the Road” gently comforts us with the familiar tones of the early 2000s. It’s like Liam Gallagher finally mellowed out and had a baby with Sigur Rós. If we’re going down, we’re at least going down in style. Maybe the song is more about the approach itself, the uncertainty of it and how we’ll conduct ourselves, but the last seven months since the song was released have provided an unhealthy amount of hindsight.
“[We] were just starting to roll out the live shows to promote it when we entered the ‘New World’,” says Kirk Comstock, ATC’s vocalist. “I’ve always felt that music is always there for these very kinds of times. As musicians: I see our job to be the emotional shamans of culture. So we just embrace and harness our emotions so that we can share them and try to help people confront and rationalize their own emotions and thoughts.”
And as they say, trying times do tend to produce great art. The curious part is that back in October, all of our global disasters were still the run-of-the-mill variety.
Comstock says he hadn’t even anticipated that “End of the Road” would stand out as the album’s single until the video had already been produced by Paul Charron.
“It’s funny because ‘End of the Road’ was one of those songs that I didn’t really pay much attention to. It kind of ended up as the last track on the record and everybody else picked that song,” says Comstock. “I don’t pick singles because I’m too close to all the songs and it always surprises me which ones people connect too. […] The whole record was actually written before the pandemic but had so much content in it that still made sense that it was a little scary. And the more I go back in the material from the past I am realizing how those songs still carry their solid meaning even more so now.”