Today's Song of the Day, as chosen by Larry Mizell, Jr., host of The Afternoon Show on KEXP, is "The End of Everything" by The Black Tones, a 2022 single on Sub Pop.
Seattle twin sibling duo The Black Tones made a splash in 2019 with their gritty debut full-length Cobain & Cornbread which saw Eva and Cedric Walker utilize blues, soul, and grunge to explore topics both light and heavy. While “Ghetto Spaceship” and “Mama! There’s a Spider in My Room” veered towards the former, songs like “The Key of Black (They Want Us Dead)” swung so dramatically towards the latter that it was clear the Walkers have important things to say.
Since then, they’ve been using their art primarily just for that - to voice their concerns about the issues, be it political or personal, of the present moment. The George Floyd protests inspired them to write “My Name’s Not Abraham Lincoln” in the summer of 2020 and, most recently, the culmination of two years of personal anxieties, grief, and anger led to our Song of the Day, “The End of Everything.”
Named after the book The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack, the song confronts the fact that, whether it’s the second coming of who or whatever you believe in, this will all end. A variety of gods and religious symbols - Jesus, Buddah, Allah, Confucious - are shouted out in the sludgey ‘90s-indebted scorcher that features vocals from former Talking Heads backing singer and member the 1970s disco group The Ritchie Family, Edna Holt.
“This song is not a jab at religion or anything like that,” Eva Walker told American Songwriter in an interview. “This song is saying, it doesn’t matter what you believe in, the second coming of whoever or whatever, this is all going to be over and it feels like humans might be speeding up that process.”
Below, watch The Black Tones' KEXP in-studio performance from 2019.
