Keep calm and “Bank On”. That seems to be the (ironic) message from David Longstreth, Dirty Projectors and s t a r g a z e in the third pre-release single from their Song of the Earth (released on 4 April 2025 via Transgressive Records internationally and Nonesuch/New Amsterdam Records in the US). Across six-and-a-half minutes, Longstreth has dropped any pretense of making music that could scan as polite indie rock, and the result is a tour de force: melodies of ravishing beauty and catchiness, surprisingly funny lyrics, and a form that stretches the verse-chorus structure of pop but somehow still lands just within it.  

This song goes places: a gorgeous solo from Dirty Projectors’ Felicia Douglass, a Longstreth verse that sounds like Songs In The Key of Life-gone-harpsichord, a signature Dirty Projectors female-harmony chorus, and a thundering Mahler-ian brass fanfare. “Bank On” confronts the curdled relationship between capitalism and manufactured complacence in the face of the wholesale destruction of our planet. 

David Longstreth: “I can imagine the title of this song in the voice of Sean Penn’s Spiccoli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High: “bank on, bro.” The title is short for a phrase in the lyrics, ‘bank on apocalypse:’ short-selling our collective investment in a livable future in the hopes of making a buck in the meantime. It’s kind of a Shock Doctrine idea. The chorus is a reverse-reverb call to prayer from the future, invoking horror and regret over our failed custodianship of the planet. The central image of “Bank On” is of one of those big granite-block, doric-columns emblems of institutional permanence built on eroding sand. Banks on banks on banks. Keep swaying the kelpbeds in Babylon. Bank on, bro.” 

Listen to “Bank On” here and watch a lyric video below.