During these turbulent times, some bands are using their music to help the Black Lives Matter movement – as New York City-based alternative electro-pop duo Satellite Mode are doing with their latest single, “Your Lungs,” with all download proceeds going to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. (In addition the band will also share exclusive covers of Modest Mouse’s “Float On” and R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming.”) “Your Lungs” is taken from the band’s EP, Robots vs. Party Girls , which is set for a July 17 release date.
Videos by American Songwriter
Regarding their donation decision, the band says in a statement: “We see this organization as catalysts of true change, with a track record on the right side of history serving landmark cases like Brown vs. Board of Education. They are providing invaluable legal services, impacting criminal justice reform, civil rights law and providing educational opportunities to those who need it most.”
Satellite Mode members Jessica Carvo and Alex Marko founded the band in 2015, and have since become noted for music that’s danceable with a surreal edge, earning more than 20 million cumulative plays across major streaming platforms. They’ve supported such acts as Shoffy, RKCB, The Band Perry and Guster, as well as headlining their own shows.
“Your Lungs” is a wistful, delicate downtempo track that Carvo says was easy to write: ‘[It] poured out onto paper in one writing session,” she says. “The collaborative process felt seamless, with each of us contributing scenes from the independent and intimate movies playing out in our minds. It was largely inspired by the various events that occurred while in the depths of the grieving process, following a tragic death in the band’s family. It was created with the pieces of a broken heart and the lingering pains of a romantic relationship cut short. It’s loaded with intense waves of nostalgia and it serves as a cathartic salvation to these experiences.”
However, since its inception, the band members realized that the song’s significance has shifted. “As we listen to the song today, in a vastly different world than the one in which it was written, we recognize how it has taken on a different meaning,” Carvo says. “The irony of having a song named “Your Lungs,” all ready for release in the time of coronavirus, is not lost on us.”
Marko agrees with this change in perspective: “The lyrics of “Your Lungs” and the feelings it evokes seem to so appropriately – and even literally – reflect our collective condition right now,” he says. “From the hundreds of thousands put on ventilators throughout the pandemic, to the horrible, unjust murder of George Floyd as he desperately whimpered, ‘I can’t breathe,’ we are searching for a way to put the air back in their lungs. While this symbolism was unforeseeable when writing the song, we hope that the underlying message of hope and healing found in its meaning helps people cope against the present backdrop. Our song proclaims, ‘We’ll find a way back out,’ and we truly believe we will.”
