Since releasing their 2018 debut LP Ruthless Sun, Ohio emo band Equipment put out a number of great EPs (including this year’s Miracle), and now they’ve finally announced a new full-length album. It’s called Alt. Account and due September 29 via the band’s own Klepto Phase label (pre-order), and two songs are out now. “LO/FO” (which stands for “log off/fuck off”) puts a distaste for social media arguments atop a blend of sunny power pop and fidgety emo, and “Username” is a little darker, harder, and more atmospheric, with backing vocals from the band’s honorary fifth member, Tori Scott, sister of guitarist Jacob Scott.
Talking about the video for “LO/FO,” singer/guitarist Nick Zander says:
We always knew we wanted to do a video for this song. I had a couple vague ideas that sounded really silly — like the synchronized birdwatching, or dressing all white like a boy band — but we weren’t able to expand upon any single idea in a deep way. We ended up spending the summer filming a few takes of the song for every funny idea we had, like, quantity-over-quality style. Filming the video was basically 80% hanging out and 20% “oh yeah we should probably do that video now,” so we’d change into our goofy outfits and get a few takes. It looks like we’re having fun in the video because that’s pretty much all we did, we just turned the camera on long enough to capture it.
We shot it over two months with probably 5 or so full days of filming. I live in Denver now so I tried to ration my visits back to Toledo just enough to be able to play a few shows and get things like this video done. It probably cost less than $100 to film because we did most of it ourselves. I say that as if we had money to not do it ourselves, lol. I got to know my Sony mirrorless camera quite well, and spent probably a couple dozen hours on Adobe Premiere. Prop shopping involved using weird stuff we already had, screwing around at the dollar store, and we may or may not have participated in the ol’ buy-and-return trick for a couple things.
I was so, so relieved that it all came together so well. I come from an “old YouTube” background so a lot of video stuff is engrained within me at this point, but I was still super nervous that the footage we got was gonna look like trash once I sat down to edit. Thankfully, I think it looks pretty good, despite the fact that we accidentally shot in slow motion a few times (easy fix). I’m proud of us for the fact that we’ve learned to become hella self-sustaining. Like, we do the music videos, packing and shipping, tour booking, and pretty much everything else ourselves, with the help of some friends. Throughout seven-or-so years of ups and downs, it’s been hard to stay 100% optimistic in the band at all times. Despite that, I’m glad we’ve held on this long, because I don’t think any other path we could’ve taken would have led to us dressing like NSYNC on a boat.
The album was produced by past collaborator Steve Warstler and recorded at recent tourmate Mat Kerekes of Citizen’s studio in Toledo. It features samples of a 12-year-old Nick Zander lifted from the YouTube gaming channel that he ran as a kid, and the album artwork features a photo of the first pill box he was given after being diagnosed with bipolar II during the writing of this album.
Check out both new songs, the album art, tracklist, and the poster for the band’s upcoming Midwest tour with Aren’t We Amphibians below.
Tracklist
1. Hot, Young Doctors
2. LO/FO
3. Hollister Henleys
4. Bad Bets
5. Jewelry
6. Minnow
7. Username
8. Your Clothes Without You In Them
9. Perfect Temperature Coffee
