Short, sweet, and snarky, first single out today “LO/FO” is the ultimate anthem against arrogant internet jerks, and takes inspiration from bands like Weezer, illuminati hotties, and PUP. Vocalist and guitarist Nick Zander (he/him) wrote it when he was 23 and decided to shift his online output to being more optimistic, reserving any negativity for government and societal injustices instead of wasting time with online bullies and trolls.

Throughout Alt. Account, we’re faced with Zander’s many insecurities and flaws––Equipment is, after all, a band formed around his songwriting, and brought to new heights with the addition of guitarist Jacob Scott (They/them), bassist Ellie Hart (they/them), and drummer Jake Pachasa (he/him). Similar to some of his inspirations like Jeff Rosenstock, Rivers Cuomo or Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years, Nick looks at his peers in high-paying jobs and wonders if he made the right decision chasing his music dream instead. He spends the majority of Alt. Account playfully poking at this imbalance and its many nuances, constantly flowing between being a mental health hot mess and a cool, calm, and collected sort of chaos.

“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.”

Alt. Account Tracklising:

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

Pre-order Alt. Account HERE