Photo: Aaron Ehinger

Work Party suffer pain and humiliation on the hilarious and thunderous “NFG”

Work Party are new Chicago band who exploded onto our radar a few weeks ago with “Drunk Conference Call” and news of a debut album coming in October. Now building off that steam, they’ve shared a second single called “NFG”, which, as you might have guessed, stands for “No Fucks Given”.

A song that unfolds in two quite different but both darkly hilarious halves, “NFG” begins as a slowish, almost sludgy hardcore sound, underscoring Tristan Widloe’s growling about his woes. He goes to the beach and the dog park in search of women, but finds nobody; “life’s not fair” he opines. This down-on-his-luck persona pairs magnificently with the undulating riffs, especially as he describes how he got jumped and had his wallet and dog stolen.

The second half of “NFG” slows things to an atmospheric crawl, and Tristan switches to a speaking voice to go into detail about his life. Recently, he’s been trying to improve his life by way of watching what goes into his body; “So, feeling pretty confident, I thought it might be time for me to start taking my shirt off in public more often,” he admits. He then details an instance when he came out of the grocery store and decided to strip down to “grab a few rays, show off my sweet new tat.” This proves to be a terrible mistake, as a group of high school kids soon spot him and start railing on him, “They grabbed a shopping cart and basically broke it across my back like pro wrestlers would,” he admits while canned audience “ooh”s spark in the background. “They grabbed a garbage can and did exactly the same thing,” he then adds, delivering it with the perfect tone to wring the most humour out of it.

The torture and humiliation isn’t done there, but I’ll let you enjoy it for yourselves as you listen along to the brilliant “NFG” below or on your preferred platform.

Work Party’s debut album My Best Days Are Behind Me is out on October 1 through Triple Eye Industries. You can find the band on Bandcamp, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.