Indifferent Engine, the wild Cambridge-based post-hardcore outfit recently signed to Church Road Records, have premiered the video for their third single, ‘Lifetime Achievement Award‘, ahead of their debut album Speculative Fiction arriving on May 30th. The track, distributed in the US via Deathwish Inc, comes with a new visual directed by up-and-coming filmmaker Sam Shepherd, known for his recent work with Terrorvision.
The video, shot in Indifferent Engine’s own practice space, captures the band’s trademark chaos: stumbling through a tangle of CRT monitors and delay pedals, pushing their sound and performance to the brink.
Raw handheld footage switches with TV monitor shots filled with scanlines, amplifying the feeling of instability that mirrors their music. “We get up and do our thing, and now they’re watching a man cry on stage while the guitar player makes bleepy bloop noises with his delay pedal and samples of Philip K Dick stories play in the background. For better or worse, Indifferent Engine really doesn’t fit in,” the band commented.
‘Lifetime Achievement Award‘ continues the heavy emotional thread woven through Speculative Fiction, blending visceral screamo intensity with influences recognizable from bands like At The Drive-In, Glassjaw, Touche Amore, and Oceansize. There’s a sense of movement and collapse throughout the song, which reflects the band’s consistent lyrical themes of failure, disaster, and systemic breakdowns.’
Back in February, the band made their first mark with ‘Crashing Into A Hillside In The Dead Of Night’, a song inspired by the 1990 Avianca Flight 52 crash. In that track, vocalist and songwriter Adam Paul explored the quiet, paralyzing moment when disaster becomes inevitable but no one acts.
Paul explained, “There’s a repeating theme of disasters on the album, which comes back over and over as a metaphorical vehicle for creating that feeling of sudden loss. When I was researching for the album, I happened to be reading a book about an air disaster, 052 Heavy… the pilots, knowing they were running out of fuel, for some reason couldn’t bring themselves to just tell air traffic control they needed to land right now. I think the song was kind of funneling in that feeling of not standing up for yourself but wishing you had or could.”
Recorded, mixed, and engineered by Tom Hill (Modern Rituals) at The Bookhouse studio in London, Speculative Fiction pushes Indifferent Engine into sharper, more restless territory. Their sound draws from post-hardcore, noise rock, contemporary prog, and alternative metal, yet they never fall neatly into any one scene. They’ve found themselves too heavy for indie crowds and too strange for standard hardcore bills, sharing stages with bands like Human Impact, Sleemo, Underdark, The Grey, and Din Of Celestial Birds.
Indifferent Engine’s live shows are extensions of the themes found in their music—glowing CRT-TV monitors clutter the stage, building a visual landscape of decay and overload. Paul, a video game developer by trade, even created a Sega Mega Drive-style game to accompany their earlier single, originally to generate video footage but later developed into a standalone release. “I figure if a creative process is interesting and I enjoy it, then it’s a good sign to just keep doing it. If I find it interesting, then chances are that other people out there will, too,” Paul said.
As Indifferent Engine look to expand beyond their Cambridge home, taking Speculative Fiction to festival slots and wider touring circuits, their blend of emotional violence and mechanical collapse remains intact. ‘Lifetime Achievement Award‘ captures the band at their most volatile and immediate—restless, stubbornly human, and always on the edge of falling apart. Can’t wait for more.
