OK Go embraces the ‘treadmill dudes’ moniker, talks new music video
Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind of OK Go chat with USA TODAY’s Ralphie Aversa about the band’s trademark single-shot music videos and their impact.
NEW YORK – Babies, movies and a pandemic. Life came at the band OK Go pretty quickly.
“The next thing we knew, it had been like 8 years since our last record and we got to work making one,” lead singer Damian Kulash tells USA TODAY, as he recounts the reasons why the group went over 10 years between albums. “But we never thought we were taking a hiatus. We just were busy.”
Busy may be an understatement. That period included Kulash and his wife Kristin Gore having twins. The couple also co-directed the 2023 comedy-drama movie “The Beanie Bubble.” Musician Andy Ross also welcomed kids. Bassist Tim Nordwind took on a few acting roles, although he adds the band “had been writing on and off during that time period.” Drummer Dan Konopka flexed his producer muscles, working on various productions for other artists by producing, mixing and mastering.
Now OK Go returns with its first full length LP in over a decade, “And the Adjacent Possible.” It’s the group’s fifth studio album and first since 2014’s “Hungry Ghosts.” A music video for the single “Love,” shot in the band’s familiar single-shot fashion, also drops with the album’s release.
“It’s all actually about these very simple mirror tricks,” Kulash describes of the video, which features a number of kaleidoscope-like visuals, set to the background of an empty train station in Budapest. “By using robots, we can access them in a much more precise and careful way. And so when early adoption of tech allows us to get at a new level of human connection, that was what makes us really excited.”
OK Go is no stranger to the early adopter game. Most notably, the band filmed a single-shot music video for the single “Here It Goes Again” in 2006 that executed an intricately choreographed routine on eight separate treadmills. The video showcased the power of YouTube in an age where more traditional outlets like MTV were abandoning music videos for reality television. It also won the Grammy for best music video in 2007.
“We’re fully aware that our gravestones will probably say, ‘Those treadmill dudes,’” Kulash, 49, jokes while reflecting on the early days of “going viral.” The album “Oh No,” which featured “Here It Goes Again,” turns 20 in August. “It was amazing what (the video) did in terms of opening up our ideas about creativity, not just in filmmaking, but in music making.
“We realized very clearly that we should only do the things that were unique to us. The whole purpose of most creative industries is to funnel people towards what is successful. If you want to make money for a year or two, that’s probably the best path. But if what you care about is making art and having people respond to it, the only thing that will ever work for anything longer than this season is what you do. Having the treadmill thing explode like that was really big eye opener to be like, ‘Write the song that only you can write.’”
That applies to “And the Adjacent Possible,” a title taken from a theory biologist Stuart Kauffman created under the idea that current conditions create the potential for future occurrences.
“We seem to be at that moment as a society in terms of tech, AI (and) possibly in terms of our politics, that there’s so many massive changes and it’s so unpredictable what’s on the other side of them,” Kulash says. “For us making this record, it honestly felt like we might be among the last people who had to make a record this way. From now on, a band might choose to make a record, but you also might choose to just press the AI button right?”
OK Go addresses this on the album opener, “Impulse Purchase,” which Kulash says is “written somewhat tongue-in-cheek” as a poem to AI and the algorithm that decides who consumes what. But he also sings about more human interactions, such as on the aforementioned track “Love,” a song inspired by the birth of his twins.
“You always hear people say, ‘Seeing the world through the eyes of my kids has made it all fresh to me,’ ” he says, admitting that’s true while also realizing that things he had become jaded or accustomed to suddenly faded away. “My barriers came down again. My understanding of the world around me feels fresher and more immediate. I couldn’t be more thankful for that. It is an expansion of love.”
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