When Bikini Kill canceled the highly anticipated reunion tour in March 2020 because of the early stages of the pandemic hitting the world, the band’s new guitarist Erica Dawn Lyle and drum tech Vice Cooler were stuck in a precarious spot. How can they be useful? They created something special that kept them close to their music with LAND TRUST Benefit For North East Farmers Of Color. One particular song on this remarkable album is “Debt Collector” with Kim Gordon, and the music video is officially live.
“Debt Collector” music video opens with a pouncing stringy beat in Los Angeles with Kim Gordon saying, “Yeh welcome, no the gated community, don’t you want to own one? You gotta have cash,” as the video comes across house after house with surveillance cameras and gates keeping unwelcome guests out.
Lyle, a long-time member of DIY punk communities, was isolated at her house in upstate New York, and Vice Cooler a photographer and video filmmaker who is also a producer for Peaches and Ladytron and the drummer for The Raincoats was stuck in his Los Angeles home, which had a recording studio. An idea was then born out of the lockdown.
It was Lyle who reached out to Cooler with a unique idea for a digital album to raise funds for the Indigenous communities and POC farmers. Cooler provided Lyle with the drum sections, to which Lyle created guitar riffs, and the team eventually established a remote recording procedure. When they had approximately a dozen nearly finished songs as a guitar-drum combo, they began reaching out to various guest vocalists in their broader group to contribute unique lyrics and, of course, sing.
The end product is a unique collaboration CD of original content rather than a standard charity compilation. LAND TRUST: NEFOC Benefit is an excellent overview of modern female punk spanning generations, encompassing punk stalwarts and newly emerging voices. It’s a combination of industrial, art-rock, post-punk, and beyond, and it features early punk giants like The Raincoats, Kim Gordon, and Alice Bag.
“In those early first days of covid, when everyone was responding more in unity to the crisis of pandemic and the ways capitalism was accentuating it, it felt suddenly easy to imagine that you could really just call up all your favorite musicians and ask them to make a record with you and that they would be really glad to help out,” Lyle said. “It felt like, ‘Well, the world’s cracked in half now, so anything is possible.’”
All proceeds will go to the Indigenous-led grassroots group Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust (NEFOC), which buys property to return to Indigenous nations and reconnect POC farmers to land stewardship and control.
Check out Debt Collector with Kim Gordon below:
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