Spitting Image Premiere Video for Their Comeback Single “Plea Dealer”

The only right way to end a long hiatus is to make a meaningful and impactful return that people take notice of, which will be no trouble with Spitting Image. The Reno punk rockers are back after a long while away, debuting today the music video for their comeback single, “Plea Dealer.” The song is the first to come from the band’s debut album Full Sun, which will be released on vinyl, cassette, and digital in March, via Slovenly Recordings.

To go along with the tense, slow-building nature of the song, the accompanying video features arthouse stylings and course imagery that accentuate the track’s bleak feel. To come up with this visual concept, the band partnered with Southern California artist MaryAnne Carey. Carey is an artist who likes her work to fly free and be open to interpretation, which is how she designed the video for “Plea Dealer.” It allows the viewer to attach their own meaning to the video’s theme.

Commenting on the new song, singer Austin Pratt says:

“We’ve always been big fans of the long-form, everything from Sonic Youth to Neu! to The Grateful Dead, and fascinated with repetition, patterns, transposing things and ideas into new contexts. The idea behind ‘Plea Dealer’ was to take one basic pentatonic blues riff, play it over and over, and let it evolve.

“Lyrically, this song is a shimmering reflection of water. Thinking on the importance of water in the desert, the fate and future of fresh water in the world, of poison, Flint (Michigan) and Jackson (Mississippi), and the climate crisis. Something about desperation and our last-ditch prayers for redemption.”

He continues by saying:

“There’s another thread I was following based on a notion a great poet once described to me. He told me that the spirit world is wetter than ours, so spirits are thirsty when they come here. But language has water in it, so they love language. So there’s something in this song about the need for new and refreshing language to save ourselves.”

With “Plea Dealer,” the members of Spitting Image emphasized a certain songwriting style wherein they tried to maximize the minimal. Guitarist Julian Jacob’s guitar riffs might be the most emblematic of this approach. He uses a minor pentatonic guitar riff that slowly builds, which helps emphasize the mood and the spirit of the song. Donovan Williams’ drumming isn’t exactly over the top, but its tense and assertive, which lends the song a certain nervous energy, which matches the lyrical anxiety that Pratt describes above.

This is a well-thought-out song representing the dynamic approach this up-and-coming quartet uses within their songwriting.

Artwork for the album ‘Full Sun’ by Spitting Image