“State to State is a band ready to leave their mark,” is what the first line of their bio says. They’re an alternative rock group from Los Angeles. The band released their first LP, titled No Bounds, back in 2014, and have been making more music ever since. They also released a new EP earlier this year, called Motives. State to State has just released a music video for their track “Arms” off of Motives, and we’ve got the premiere.
The video is completely black and white, with a historic film feel. It’s wartime, and the video seems to get increasingly serious as each second goes by. This contrasts interestingly with the music, because the music feels relaxed and almost beachy. In regards to the track and the video, guitarist Andrew Orvis says that, “As the world was growing numb to the daily news of mass shootings, bombing massacres, unnecessarily slain civilians & police, and overall violent tragedies across the globe, the lyrics to ‘Arms’ were on constant repeat in my head. I kept hearing the chorus, ‘We gotta lay down our arms instead of our lives’ after San Bernardino, Orlando, Dallas, France, Baghdad, Turkey, Bangladesh, Syria, Iraq and every other recent slaughtering of innocent lives. I needed to express my honest emotions so I created the video using vintage clips of real people and events. To me the video is about human connection and the unending cycle of violence and death in our lives from both war and weaponry.”
Their message is loud and clear: “We gotta lay down our arms, instead of our lives.”
