Detroit alt-rock disruptors The Messenger Birds aren’t here to play nice or play it safe. Their blistering new single “FAKE LIVES” is a sharp critique of the curated chaos of social media, leading the charge for their provocatively titled upcoming EP GRAMMY AWARD WINNING ALBUM IT’S ALL A BLUR, due out June 13th. Known for their seismic sound, dystopian visuals, and unapologetic takes, Parker Bengry and Chris Williams seek to confront 2025’s information overload with loud guitars, heavy truth, and just the right amount of nihilism. We caught up with Parker Bengry to talk about their new single, Detroit grit, and Kim Kardashian.
JG: “FAKE LIVES” hits hard with its critique of curated personas and social media distortion. Was there a particular breaking point moment that pushed you guys to write it?
Parker Bengry: I don’t know if there was necessarily a breaking point. Just in general, I’m not the biggest fan of social media. I don’t like to spend a lot of time on it. I’m there as much as I am just because I have to be for my job. We’ve all become glued to it in various ways. Facebook’s probably one of the worst ones, and then Twitter feels like an alternate universe now. But, it’s all sorta driving controversy over anything.
With TikTok and Instagram, everyone’s geared to hop on whatever trend is hot at the moment. It’s just annoying to be around that. There’s not a lot of authenticity. It all feels like you’re being fed the same thing over and over again and forced into a space where you either participate or argue with each other, and it feels toxic. So that’s where a lot of that came from, I guess.
JG: As an artist, do you feel like social media is a bit of a necessary evil?
Parker Bengry: I mean, yeah. Like I said, I’m pretty much only there because it’s part of my job. It’s become a platform for marketing, and that’s essentially how I use it. If I’m not privately sharing stuff I think is funny with friends of mine, I’m posting promotional content, whether it’s clips of our new video or sharing blurbs or excerpts of songs. It’s just more like a thing that you have to participate in as opposed to a thing that I would like to participate in, if that makes any sense. It’s part of the gig.
JG: Your EP title GRAMMY AWARD WINNING ALBUM IT’S ALL A BLUR is deliciously ironic. Is it a jab, a prophecy, or both?
Parker Bengry: Maybe both. I don’t know. A lot of things I write, whether intentional or not, take on this nihilistic view. It’s something that somebody pointed out to me recently, and I was like, I don’t know if I necessarily thought of all this as nihilistic and like nothing matters, but, you can take a step back and and look at things like that and go like, well, I guess maybe it doesn’t matter as much as people make it out to. The album title is a bit of a joke, maybe a little bit of a jab at the state of the music industry culture. The Grammys, or any award for that matter, that’s touted by the industry and put on a pedestal for everyone to gawk at, it just feels like a clout chasing contest.
I personally don’t care about the Grammys, and that’s nothing against anybody who’s ever won one or who’s made that a goal of theirs, but I just don’t think there’s a whole lot of meaning in it anymore. I don’t know the last time it really meant anything. Back to the EP, it’s not an album. It’s four songs.
It’s not a full album. That was part of the joke, too. And, you know, no one else is gonna name a collection of songs GRAMMY AWARD WINNING ALBUM as part of the title, so we just thought it was a funny thing to do.
JG: It sounds like chasing industry validation doesn’t really mean all that much to you. But do you see yourself maybe eventually wanting to head more mainstream, or are you more focused on just creating the art that moves you?
Parker Bengry: I think that if your goal is to be mainstream, then you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. It has to be about the art first, above everything else. And if it wasn’t, then I don’t think that we would still be doing this because we’re not in this to make money. We’re not in this for fame. We’re not in this for clout. We’re doing it because we like doing it. We’re not very wealthy because of it by any stretch of the imagination. We have fun making these songs, the songs that make statements and are important to us. I think that all good art has that purpose. It’s not just about making something that everybody likes. It’s first about making something that we like and that means something to us. If you can stay true to that, then hopefully enough people will latch onto it and relate to it as well.
JG: Your sound smashes together elements from post-grunge, desert rock, noise, and cinematic post-rock. What artists or albums raised you musically?
Parker Bengry: That’s a great question and has a long answer, probably longer than I can give you the full version of. I’ll speak for myself. I won’t necessarily speak for Chris, but we have a lot of the same long-time influences, and we grew up together. We met when we were 14, so we’ve been listening to a lot of the same stuff for a long time. When we were first learning guitar, drums, and just general instruments, we got into the classic rock stuff. Led Zeppelin. Rolling Stones. Black Sabbath. All that stuff.
From there, you evolve with whatever era is happening at the time. We came up in the big emo boom of the early two thousands. For me, my biggest long-time influence has been Bright Eyes, which doesn’t necessarily come through in our sound. I’ve been listening to Bright Eyes since I was 13, and I think that nobody turns a phrase better than Conor Oberst. So that’s definitely a big one for me. Rage Against The Machine was another really big one.
Queens of the Stone Age. You mentioned Desert Rock. It doesn’t get any better than that, and they’re still doing it. That’s one band from that era where I feel like I’ve listened to every record of theirs, and there hasn’t really been one that I don’t like. I don’t think they’re a band that really reinvents themselves much either. They just make what they wanna make, and they’re some of the last true rock stars of our time.
JG: God. Queens of the Stone Age. They know what they do well, and they kind of stick to that. There’s something really admirable about that in a way.
Parker Bengry: I think the other thing about them too is just they make what they make, and they don’t give a shit what anybody thinks. And I appreciate that. The list of bands that have influenced me is very long. I listen to everything from post-rock Explosions in the Sky-type stuff to Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails. That’s another one where every release has something for me.
Currently, artists that I’m into right now pretty big time are Mannequin Pussy. Their recent album is one of my favourites at the moment. Turnstile is another one. They’re about to put out a new album.
JG: You’ve said the new EP is about “watching the world fall apart in real time.” Does creating music like this feel like a way to process the madness or is it more like shouting into the void?
Parker Bengry: Maybe a little bit of both. I feel like releasing music independently is a little bit like shouting into the void, literally and metaphorically, because you never know who’s gonna hear it or where it’s gonna end up.
Like I said before, it’s more about me saying some stuff that’s on my mind and trying to speak some sort of truth to my own personal experience in a way that’s relatable. I wouldn’t say every song is 100% literal, but I could tell you exactly where I was and what I was doing when I wrote it. Every day, there’s some sort of new disaster happening. You’re just watching all these things change day over day, some new insanity, and it’s usually coming out of the US. The trend in world politics is heading in a weird direction. It just feels like a dumpster fire every single day, and it’s hard to get away from. So I think you just bury yourself in the creative process and see what comes out.
JG: I wanted to ask you about the “FAKE LIVES” video. It’s really dystopian and kind of eerie in a way. How involved are you in the visual storytelling aspect?
Parker Bengry: We have a pretty close-knit group of friends in the Detroit area that we’ve worked with for a long time. Our buddy Ray has shot a lot of videos with us. It usually just turns into a thing where we’re sitting around in the basement or something, or at the bar, and we’re just talking about really dumb or totally insane ideas. Nine times out of ten, we don’t have the budget to make them, and then, we land on one that works. This one just sort of became this thing where we had this idea for this video to look both futuristic and from the past at the same time. That’s why we shot it on an old camcorder.
It’s the same camcorder that Kim Kardashian shot that “Santa Baby” video on, if you’ve seen that. It’s super unhinged, one of the greatest videos I’ve seen all year. If you haven’t seen it, you should look at it. It’s something. But, I don’t know how else to describe it. Basically, it’s this old, kinda grainy camcorder footage. I don’t remember what the name of the camera is; I’d have to ask Ray. Then we built a Mylar box where we just draped Mylar all around Chris’ garage and then put a super hot white light flashing inside there. Ray got up close with a fisheye lens on us, and that was it.
JG: Wow. Okay. I’ll have to check that video out. Wasn’t expecting the Kim K connection, but I’ll see what that’s all about.
Parker Bengry: There isn’t any real connection other than we used the same camera that she did, but it’s a vibe. I’ll say that.
JG: Detroit is known for its grit and reinvention. How has that environment influenced your sound?
Parker Bengry: Probably more than I am aware of. I’ve grown up writing songs and playing music in this scene, and the scene has changed a lot from the time of Iggy and the Stooges to the White Stripes to now, but it’s ingrained in everybody. There’s this punk rock subculture that just lives here. I think anybody who’s played local shows and played around some of the legendary venues that still exist here, whether they’re the same venue that they were thirty years ago or if they’ve gone under a name change, new ownership, whatever, it just becomes a part of you.
I would say that we’re carrying on the legacy of that and that there’s a little bit of that sound in us. I feel like a lot of the Detroit bands that I know and listen to definitely have something that’s specifically Detroit that you couldn’t pick out of any other band from anywhere else. You could say the same thing about the New York scene, where you had the Strokes and their version of indie rock was very different from the White Stripes, even though they’re kinda categorized in the same space.
There were probably 20 other bands that were coming up in Detroit at the same time as the White Stripes that all sounded very similar. A lot of those guys are still around. They’re still playing music, the White Stripes were just the one that hit it big. But if you go back and listen to all those bands, they all have that sound. That undercurrent between them all.
JG: What’s on the horizon for The Messenger Birds? What’s next?
Parker Bengry: What’s next? Well, the big thing is getting the EP out, trying to get as many eyes on it as we can, and hoping that people will enjoy it and take something away from it. Outside of that, we’ve got some shows that we’ll announce at some point soon. So I can’t give any more details about that right now, but there will be some shows. There will be some tour dates. That’s the plan as of right now.
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