Prince Edward Island’s Calm Baretta want to dreamily lure you in to a world of decadence with their newest single “Slack Royalty“—at least until they slap you around a bit and remind you that you are not your possessions.
“Slack Royalty“ was recorded over the course of two days in Halifax late last November with the band returning to work with engineer and producer John Mullane.
“The song is centred around a relationship between two people, but more broadly about consumer addiction,” explains Calm Baretta’s Joshua Carter.
“It’s about a person who believes that by having more things in life they will be able to achieve happiness. Eventually there is a breaking point and the person is left alone because of this addiction. Only when it’s too late do they realize what the real important things are. Staying in touch. Strengthening bonds. Non material things.”
“It’s a story of society, I guess: where we are now, where we are going. People just want things, more things all the time. [They] should focus on the real things,” says Carter, a self-proclaimed minimalist.
And fair enough, we’ve been beating ourselves up about this since before Fight Club pushed our collective noses through the IKEA catalogue nearly two decades ago. Our landfills still find ways to fill up with coffee pods and oceans accumulated plastic microbeads. We might not be Jack’s possessions, but we are his insatiable lust for the accumulation of status symbols and knickknacks like our existence might be brought to a sudden end and the sum total of our lives calculated by weight and lumens.
The world is headed for the dumpster, and it’s not like we don’t see it coming. We’re just not better than a bunch of incurable magpies readying our treasures for the afterlife.