At some point during our adult lives, we’ve been under the hold of presenteeism.
The idea of having to be present at your place of work for more hours than is required, whether so to be seen as a keen prospect for promotion or due to the anxiety or insecurity we hold about our jobs – has a constant detrimental impact on our well-beings and desires.
Even in jobs we don’t particularly care about, but nonetheless need to survive, the modern day expectations have led us to working ourselves into physical and emotional exhaustion, just to be able to float. With their new single ‘Presenteeism’ – Public Body address this explicitly, cleverly fulfilling their own narrative expectation by finding a balance of succinctness in lyricism and freedom in musicianship
Public Body possess a keen sense of awareness for the distracting mundanities of everyday life that a lot of their contemporaries cleverly interject their sharp-cutting music with. Yet what makes them stand apart is a more intrinsic, looser form of musicianship – the track carrying a thick cut of a hook that still allows the overall atmosphere of the track to take centre-stage – the band wriggling loose with distorted breaks before cutting right back into it’s lackadaisical refrain of “PRESENTEEISM”
Taking a gnarled and laconic approach to expressing themselves, a gruff shrug meets the daily monotonous grind of clocking in to the office job, skimming emails on autopilot without ever really knowing or caring what’s going on. It’s an intelligent contrast to the instrumentation – the feeling of restriction in the narrative juxtaposed by the creatively satiating autonomy the group provide themselves musically.