The Brvtalist is pleased to premiere a new video from California Girls. The project of Australian artist Gus McGrath, “Body Work” comes off the new album, Beat Boy out Friday on Dero Arcade. Working between pop, club music and post-punk, California Girls has been operating from his hometown in Canberra since 2014, before moving to Sydney at the end of 2019. His debut album Desire (2016, Moontown Records) came to terms with the complexities of romance through contemporary synth pop. With Beat Boy, McGrath uses pop approaches to dissect emotional and theoretical ideas of being and the album is built around performances of identity and sex, which he attempts to play out through a pop frame work. With “Body Work” we find an infectious track which subverts pop music and gets under the skin and confronts the demons within. Watch the video and read about the artist’s inspiration below.

The main idea for the song came from this interview I read with this make-up artist named Harry Charlesworth - “Have you ever pretended to be someone else in the mirror?
No, I don't like trying to be something I'm not. Every character I want to be already exists within myself, and they all get their turn to give shows in front of the mirror."

This quote has influenced pretty much everything I’ve done since - this idea of transformation which isn’t this thing of turning into something you’re not, but allowing these extremes of yourself to come out. The song is kinda about grappling with, for want of better terms, these like monstrous desires, and in a very horror movie way almost being like “what is it that I want? What's inside of me?” Maybe it’s about being greedy and giving in to desire. It’s about having a body and making it work, using it for whatever purpose you want. Maybe it’s similar to Nightmare on Elm St 2.

As a kid I was really obsessed with horror movies and spooky stuff, which has always kinda stuck around, but last year I became really obsessed with making video and text art about how it would be really powerful to turn into Freddy Krueger cause he was always my favourite as a teen and I was thinking about being a teenager and imagining inhabiting that monstrousness as this beautiful and powerful thing. From that, it shifted into this obsession with costume shops and cheap Halloween masks because I really liked this idea of this really simple dress-up that can allow us to perform characters that are already a part of us or inside us, like exaggerations. So in the video I tried to use those halloween but beyond this blunt “scary” thing into this more powerful transformation.

The found-footage-y/creepy online video vibe came up because I’ve been really into this Unsolved Mysteries episode from the early 90’s about this teenage metal-head arsonist who made these videotapes of the fires he lit and these weird performances to camera, which they say is him pretending to be a werewolf and a vampire. I liked that there was this performance of trying to be this monster beyond yourself. I like that I could kinda see this connection between that kid, so the video uses this set of weird performances and towing this line between weird and fun? Maybe a dash of like sexy vs dangerous too?

Broadly, I’ve liked the idea of collaborating more because my first album Desire was done pretty much alone. I’m lucky to not only sample my dearest friend and excellent poet Madalyn Trewin in the middle of the track, but also another of my closest friends, Jacob Reid, did a really incredible job with the editing, because I sent through all this weird footage and an outline, but Jacob did a really incredible job of pacing and timing and pulling it together!

Beat Boy is out August 21st on vinyl and digital and you can order yours now on Bandcamp.

-JRS