In the 21 years since Ride last released a record, plenty has changed, and plenty has stayed eerily similar. The British indie legends' fifth studio album, Weather Diaries—their first since 1996's Tarantula—is out tomorrow, June 16, and again they find themselves releasing music while a Conservative government picks away at the social fabric of their homeland. The difference now is that things are tougher to ignore—things feel less stable than ever both east and west of Britain. So "All I Want," the album's third single, marked an unexpectedly political turn for the quartet."There's an ill wind blowing / Maybe you feel it too / Strange people on the rise / One day they're gonna come for you," Mark Gardener sang over glistening reverb and a relentless drum line. "While you were sleeping on it / Your future was thrown from under you / It's not a pretty picture / This is 1932." In a press release to coincide with the song's release, the band said that Prime Minister Theresa May's decision to press companies into listing their foreign workers was the impetus behind the comparison. "As it turned out, that never happened because of the outcry about it, but that was the origin of the line comparing the U.K. to 1930's Germany," the band wrote. "It's not like Ride are 'going political,' it's more that the current state of the UK is so terrible that we could not avoid writing about it when we were writing lyrics for the album." That comparison was a little simplistic—if you want a fun ten minutes, here's the Wikipedia page for "Reductio ad HItlerum"—but "strange people on the rise" hits a nerve. The band are tapping into the devastation around them.The video for the track, premiering on Noisey today, was directed by Jade Mortimer. It relies on simplicity and detailed camerawork to capture the exertion at the heart of the track. "I wanted to build a video around it's pace and atmosphere," Mortimer wrote in an email to Noisey. "On first hearing the track I pictured some kind of journey taking place, so I came up with a simple idea of this character on this journey. He's running, from or to something, and he's sweaty, tired, exhausted and in pain. Throughout the video his journey and performance heightens and intensifies. Capturing his emotion with the use of lighting and camera movement, I wanted it to build throughout the track from beginning to end."Watch the video in full at the top of the page. Weather Diaries is out tomorrow.Follow Alex Robert Ross on Twitter.
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