Late Night Drive Home Builds Their Own Haunted Amusement Park with New Single “Terabyte”

Perfectly timed with your summer road trips and late beach nights, Late Night Drive Home is announcing their new album, as i watch my life online out on Epitaph Records, June 27th, along with lead single, “Terabyte.” This follows their breakout hit, “Stress Relief,” and reveals a more self-assured identity of the band, ready to tackle their upbringing on the world wide web. 

Upon first listen to “Terabyte,” I thought somehow lead singer, Andre Portillo, had gotten access to my journal. Then I remembered I haven’t consistently reported to a journal since high school and I’m hit by how pervasive our feelings of dread regarding the development of the internet, especially over the last ten years, weigh heavily on our collective conscience. 

The song begins with a synth gearing up for something adventurous. This immediately leads into the pillowy bounce of a beat offering a musical playground of a blithe bass line, dancing electronic glitches, and soulful guitar licks. It’s all fun and games on “Terabyte.” Until it’s not. The effervescent rhythm gradually leads into a smooth and jazzy sequence of piano keys then abruptly gives way to a haunting, steady pressing of the ivory as we descend quickly into the darkness of internet rabbit holes, obsessions, and nefarious digital addictions. 

The album artwork is an amalgamation of symbolism, almost too on the nose but also fair for a group of performers who never experienced a world without the internet. In the image, an anonymous figure stands in a bathtub holding up a mirror to another. Their face is obscured by a blinding flash. The layers of meaning! The poetry. 

While the sounds are professional polished from recording an album in a studio as opposed to their bedroom for the first time, the sentiments are as human as could be. as i watch my life online builds on the themes and emotions expressed on terabyte laying out all our grievances and repercussions we’re facing from our own man-made invention.

“Over-exposed and over-stimulated, desensitized to what is real and what is fabricated, desensitized to the simple things,” flows off lead singer Andre Portillo’s tongue about the forthcoming album. “This constant need for more of you has become a Pandora’s box in this modern age. I’m obsessed, you mean so much to me and without you, I would be staring at a different reflection in the mirror. You’ve made me. You’ve destroyed me. I sometimes wonder why I can’t live without you.”

Everyone’s starving, yearning for real, tactile, life experiences and meaningful connection and yet we can’t pull ourselves away. The internet has become both our salvation and our trap. In the same tool that you have a blank canvas to create your own art, you’re also subject to predatory ads and insidious personal data mining. One might go so far as to say it’s another example of the classic tale of capitalism preying on our weaknesses but I’ll save that for my next journal entry. 

Listen to “terabyte” here.

Words by Ilana Rubin