Strange Men Release New Single & Video “Do What The Boys Do”

Róisín Isner (she/her) was seventeen when she found a burned CD wedged above a conduit on the ceiling at a punk show at San Francisco’s Bottom Of The Hill. A year later she met fellow teenager Ashley Clayton (he/him) at a birthday party. It would be a few more years before they put together that the demo she’d once found on a club ceiling was his. Flash forward to 2024 and they are the sole members of SF indie punk outfit Strange Men, with Róisín playing drums and Ashley playing an 8-string guitar he made out of scavenged wood, they both sing.

The band’s latest single Do What The Boys Do is a chaotic journey across shades of garage, psych, and punk, grounded by Róisín’s darkly murmured vocals. Written amidst the mental health and overdose epidemic, the track reflects the manic trauma of seeing loved ones in crisis while struggling to survive your own darkened thoughts. Alternately subversive and grimly funny, what begins as a seemingly rote “girl power” anthem twists into a satire of the superficiality of capitalist feminism, explores impulses of self-annihilation, and interpolates Corey Hart‘s 1983 hit, Sunglasses at Night.

The music video, co-directed by George S. Rosenthal and Panda Dulce (aka Kyle Casey Chu) at the Complex Recording Studio, is equally deranged. Created with the goal of being shot and edited live in a single take, Róisín and Ashley had to dash between marks while eight cameras filmed simultaneously. The footage was then brought down to just a few frames per second, before being fed into AI programs to recreate the missing frames. “We wanted to break the AI,” explains Róisín, “and have it spit out the creepiest, most haunted images possible.” The resulting video is at once unnervingly distorted and irreverently playful, matching the track’s disorderly energy.