Five Hundred Bucks Release Debut Album “$500” & New Single & Video “Follicles”

Philly area punks Five Hundred Bucks have released their debut full-length titled $500. Featuring members of The Holy Mess, The Bella Vista Social Club, Brackish and Captain, We’re Sinking, Five Hundred Bucks‘ debut is the follow up to their well-received 2020 singles, Shit Shape Heart and Spinal. The band has also released the album’s first single, Follicles, and an impressive special effects-laden music video that belies its DIY budget. Film fans may recall that frontman Jeff Riddle co-produced, acted in, and wrote the music for the 2020 cult horror-comedy Uncle Peckerhead (which, for what it’s worth, currently has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes).

“Matthew John Lawrence (writer/director of Uncle Peckerhead) and I wrote the concept together and got a lot of the crew from Uncle Peckerhead back together to make the video. Jared Balog, who did all the special and practical effects for the movie, built us a life-like dead alien and Wicky Mendoza the production designer/costumer came on board to work on it too and I produced it. It was our first time working with Tony Coon the cinematographer/camera operator who just really knocked it out of the park and was such a huge help he became a producer on it.“

“The song “Follicles” is pretty personal to me. It’s about my parents and their shortcomings as a mother and father. It’s about growing older and having perspective on the situation and realizing who they were and what they were going through and despite my best efforts to separate myself from them at an early age and not want to be like them, fighting some of the same battles that they fought — depression, anxiety, addiction etc. The video is a narrative driven video about a lonely person who lives in rural America and a UFO crashes and he finds this dead alien. He brings it inside and cleans it up and develops an attachment and friendship with it and it’s the closest he’s ever felt to being accepted by anyone. We didn’t make the video as a direct correlation to the song, but it has a lot of thematic parallels.”

You can get $500 on vinyl and digital formats here