Sunbloc’s “Reverse” started with two people who once did almost everything together and barely speak now. The Albany, New York five-piece, whose music pulls hardcore into the more melodic territory of 90s alternative rock and post-hardcore, have given the song a new video, and watching it back made vocalist Mathew Bradley think about the friends who are still around.
He came away wanting to call them, maybe see if anyone fancied a coffee. A pretty ordinary thought to have after spending two days filming with your friends, except “Reverse” is about the sort of friendship you thought would last forever.
The song closes “Joyride“, the band’s four-track EP released earlier this year.
Bassist Keefer traces it back to a relationship between two people who weren’t related but had become family through everything they’d experienced together.
They had similar upbringings, spent practically every moment with each other and made plans for a future they expected to share. Then the relationship disintegrated, with little explanation and hardly any closure.
“The song is essentially about estrangement. Itโs about the loss of chosen-family.”
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Keefer puts the confusion into a question that will probably sound familiar to anyone who’s watched a close friendship disappear: “You two use to be attached at the hip what happened”.
There is a certain kind of frustration in the lyrics. “Time moves and now we’re strangers” comes after memories of being together every day, growing up in a small town and making plans. Now even talking about the relationship seems to send the two people further apart. Someone who used to be the first person you’d call has become somebody you struggle to communicate with.
Across “Joyride“, that estrangement reaches into the way people see themselves. Keefer talks about building up expectations of others and of your own life, then having those expectations collapse. There can be anger towards the other person, guilt about your own actions, and a strange distance from who you used to be. The questions get harder the longer you sit with them.
“Who am I now, who was I then and where was my misstep, was it a misstep?”
Sunbloc have been working around the edges of hardcore and alternative rock since “Sunday Music” in 2023, and followed that record with the more straightforward hardcore of “Enemies at All Times” in 2024. “Joyride” keeps some of that directness but leaves plenty of room for melody.
“Crashing” moves between stomping, 2000s Boston-style hardcore verses and much breezier choruses, with a guitar sound that owes something to the British alternative records the band love. The group have interests in Britpop, shoegaze and 90s bands such as Farside, all of which have a place in their approach to writing rock music.
“Reverse” runs just over three minutes, with shifts in tempo and intensity that director Jake Lutter heard as opportunities for the film. The song already had movement built into it, along with lyrics concerned with time passing and the difficulty of returning to an earlier point in a relationship.
“Sometimes I get really lucky and a band brings me a really great song to make a video for, and this is no exception, Reverse not only sonically rules but has an innate visual nature to the lyricism and structure, I knew I’d want to feel the tug and pull of time, the song has such great changes in tempo and dynamics which is great for making a video.”
The title suggested part of the technique straight away. Jake wanted footage running backwards and sections sped up, along with handheld, skate-style camerawork that could follow the song’s changes without getting too rigid.
He and the band had several video calls before filming, talking about relationships that drift apart, how people behave around each other and the emotions attached to those changes.
At the centre of the video are Mathew and Sunhead, the masked figure who appears driving a car on the “Joyride” artwork.
Jake wanted a certain tension between them, with moments of genuine fun and others where their distance becomes apparent.
The story is loose enough to leave things open, but the two characters have time together, experiences they share and something between them that changes.
Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” was one of the band’s visual inspirations, and they already had a pretty peculiar world to draw from. Michael Giurato’s artwork for “Joyride”, developed with Mathew’s art direction and layout, is packed with strange characters. Some of them became additional masks for the shoot.
The car was given a Sunbloc logo across its front and a title-card bumper sticker, while several locations were chosen because of their connections to the members’ pasts.
Mathew had seen all those details being assembled individually. He’d helped put some of them together. Yet the edit was the first time they made complete sense to him.
“It was really cool to see how all the shots that were taking out of sequence came together to form a full thought out narrative. Jake took our Paris, Texas inspiration and really helped me feel closer to the song than ever before.”
“Seeing these things for the first time, made me feel like I was truly dropped right into the Sunbloc universe.”
The car deserves some attention of its own, particularly because there was a point when the entire shoot looked as though it might be finished by a suspension failure.
Sunbloc’s friend Porky is a serious car enthusiast. The band originally asked if he knew somebody who owned a vehicle resembling the one Sunhead drives on the cover, hoping they could borrow or rent it for filming.
Through a friend, Porky found a blue 1964 Buick Electra 225 for sale. He ended up buying it.
That decision created a lot of extra work. Porky spent weeks sanding and doing bodywork to make the Buick resemble its illustrated counterpart, with the band helping wherever they could. It was a remarkably good match in terms of shape, and by the time the camera rolled, it had taken on a lilac colour that Mathew particularly enjoyed.
Porky finished the car only a couple of days before the shoot, leaving almost no time to sort out the mechanical problems. The brakes were a little questionable, the steering was extremely sensitive, and Keefer believes Porky had to improvise a solution for the driveshaft just to get the Buick running.
The hydraulics were fun to play around with, at least until they stopped working.
Filming took place over two days in July, with a small crew moving around Albany. Jake called it a guerrilla-style production. They had no permits, and the first day’s schedule was particularly tight because Sunbloc also had an out-of-town show to play.
It was the band’s first proper music video, and scheduling had already caused them to postpone filming a couple of times. That delay gave Porky more time to finish the car, although there still wasn’t enough time to get it properly tested.
Jake normally spends a good deal of time working out his shots in advance. He likes storyboards and detailed lists, and tends to build much of the eventual edit in his head before filming begins. Albany required him to work very differently.
“I usually storyboard / shoot lists quite a bit, to build an edit in my head even before stepping on set. This project was so different. Despite my efforts the run and gun nature of the production forced me to improvise so much more than usual.”
With people moving between locations, the car requiring constant attention and the schedule getting tighter, handheld footage became increasingly useful. Jake could follow the people in front of him and pick up their reactions without asking them to repeat every movement.
“The handheld B roll really became its own character in the edit, more so than I imagined, which I think really benefited the video, keeping real candid expression of all the performances in the video.”
Some of the shots the band had planned never happened at all.
On the final day, they were beginning to film individual members playing their instruments inside the Buick when one of the air bags in its hydraulic suspension system burst.
The suspension dropped, leaving the bumper dragging along the ground. The car needed to get back to Porky’s workshop, and there wasn’t enough time left to arrange another shoot.
Everyone was pretty disappointed. Those instrumental shots had been part of the plan, the video was unfinished and the crew had already put two busy days into it. They could try to finish on another date, or accept what they had.
Jake still wanted one final large scene, with extras gathered around the Buick and fireworks going off. The car could barely make it anywhere, so they brought everyone to Porky’s garage and decided to film there.
The biggest scene in “Reverse” was shot at the workshop because the Buick had broken down, and Jake ended up preferring the new location.
Porky managed to get the car back, with its damaged suspension and bumper dragging close to the ground. The band and crew directed the extras to the workshop, got everything into position and worked through several practice runs. They didn’t have many fireworks to waste.
Keefer believes they managed only two actual takes. During one of them, a firework landed in a dumpster.
It started smoking and then caught fire. The crew scrambled to grab extinguishers, buckets and water from the garage hose. Someone nearby apparently alerted the authorities, although Keefer isn’t certain who made the call. Police officers and firefighters arrived, checked what had happened and made sure the dumpster was properly extinguished before leaving.
The crew had their final shots. That was the end of filming.
Jake, who had spent the previous two days dealing with a barely functioning hero car and an increasingly improvised production, offered a suitably short assessment.
“We did accidentally set a dumpster on fire, which was also pretty sick.”
He was particularly pleased with how the workshop scene turned out. The whole production had become a matter of adjusting to whatever happened next, and he had been able to use footage and locations he couldn’t have properly planned beforehand.
“I’m really proud of what we threw together despite all the setbacks, at one point our car fully broke and we had to totally find a new location for our biggest scene in our video.”
Watching the resulting film, it’s easy to understand why Mathew remembers the experience so fondly. A bunch of friends had worked together to make something, driven around in a ridiculous old Buick and spent two days filming in places that meant something to them.
“Kinda badass to be able to rip around in a lilac colored Buick Electra 225 with some of my best friends. Thanks Porky for hooking us up with that sick car.”
One moment near the end stayed with Mathew in a different way.
He’s sitting in the passenger seat, looking out of the window. Sunbloc guitarists Angie and Evan are beside him, laughing and joking. During the actual shoot, Mathew had been thinking about friendships, both current and long gone. He wondered how those people were getting on, where they were living and where life was taking them.
Seeing the scene later brought those thoughts back, along with memories of the good times that had made those relationships important.
“Watching it played out on screen, just reminds me to hold onto those beautiful moments connected to that longing, as opposed to the loss.”
The finished film also changed how he heard “Reverse”.
“Seeing this all in a final piece, makes me see the song less as a melancholy yearning for what once was but more hopeful for whatโs to blossom.”
There is still plenty of hurt in the lyrics, and nothing about making the video has altered the relationship Keefer originally described. People sometimes disappear from each other’s lives without a proper goodbye, and the questions that follow can hang around for years.
Mathew is now thinking about the people who have remained close through whatever life has thrown at them.
“Life is hard and strange. We may loss some people that we thought would last forever, but the ones that keep calling back are what makes life bearable.”
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“Joyride” was recorded at Silver Bullet Studios in Burlington, Connecticut, with Chris Teti, Gregory Thomas and Nick DeMichele producing, engineering and mixing. Will Putney handled mastering at Graphic Nature Audio in New Jersey, while Jade Brannon contributed guest vocals to “Hillsdale”. The EP was written and performed by Sunbloc themselves, with Mathew on vocals, Keefer on bass, Sean on drums, Nick on guitar and Evan on guitar and backing vocals.
The four-song record was released digitally on 16 April 2026 and is available on 7-inch vinyl through Immigrant Sun Records and cassette through New Enterprise, the label run by Drug Church members Chris Villeneuve and Cory Galusha. The latter also photographed the band for their promotional images. “Joyride” is available to
The “Reverse” video is directed by Jake Lutter, with the band due to follow its release with a new tour announcement. For Mathew, though, the finished film has already given him one thing to do.
He wants to pick up the phone, call his friends and ask if anyone wants to grab a cup of coffee.
Sunbloc are also heading back on the road.
First up is a four-date October run with Growblind, stopping in Morgantown (October 22), Scranton (October 23), Philadelphia (October 24) and Baltimore (October 25). Then, in spring 2027, they’ll join Four Year Strong on their “Rise or Die Trying” and 25th Anniversary Tour, alongside Drug Church and Heart Attack Man.
The massive US run kicks off March 20 in Buffalo and wraps up April 30 in Boston, with stops in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Albany and plenty of other cities along the way.
Check out more photos from the video set below:
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