The Very Next Of

The Very Next Of
Studio album by The Drugs
Released	13 September 2004
Recorded	October 2003
Genre	Alternative rock
Length	44:44
Label	Shock Records
The Drugs chronology
Music's in Trouble (2002) The Very Next Of (2004) none

The Very Next Of is the second and final album by the Drugs. It was released in 2004. Track 14, "I Was a Teenage Voter", was released on Rock Against Howard two weeks before the Drugs album's release. The album has since been deleted from Shock Records' catalogue.

The cover is a parody of the cover to their previous album Music's in Trouble, with part of an updated black and white photo of the Drugs laid over a low quality scan of the album cover of Music's in Trouble. Track 1 is a piss take of the same track from Music's in Trouble, where the track (remastered) is played for 15 seconds but then interrupted by a Drug saying "This is exactly how we started the last album!".

The album was rereleased in late 2011 with the Masking Agents box set. However, it is not a remastered version, but an original copy from unsold stock left from before Shock deleted the album.

Track 20 is actually an intro that leads directly into track 21, similar to TISM's "Michael Jackson's Conveyor Belt/Bishop = Handjob", Crass's "System/Big Man, Big M.A.N." and Nine Inch Nails' "The Frail/The Wretched". Track 22 is a partial acoustic version of "Sons of Air Supply" from Music's in Trouble. The sounds at the end of track 10 are a woman crying under the Mope FM DJ (voiced by Marty Fields) delivering a deadpan monologue about using payphones to call sex lines.

The album had no singles, but the songs "Rogue States" and "Appease Your God and Kill a Mormon" were played on radio in the lead up to the album's release. Only two tracks survive on the internet today: "The Most Annoying Ringtone" and "I Was a Teenage Expletive". These tracks are streamable from their MySpace page.

Rogue States video

A screenshot from the video

A video was made for "Rogue States" and can be viewed on YouTube.^[1]

The video is set in a generic Australian secondary college and centres on four characters: Kylie, Paul, Rod and Ula. Ula is a stereotypical alien. The other characters pick on her. The video begins with Harry Snow playing the intro drum beat then cuts to Ula walking into the school grounds and the other students laughing and pointing at her and then cuts to Ian Baddley shouting the "mass destruction" line before cutting to a classroom with a head-on close up of Kylie throwing pencils at Ula while mouthing the words "Let's go get him".

The rest of the video is intercut with the Drugs in school uniforms playing the song. During the chorus, the main human students and other students participate in TP-ing Ula as she sits down and reads a book. Ula is then shown tied to a flying fox and it then cuts to Rod shaking his head with the caption "Rod feels conflicted" next to him. The second verse is set entirely in the classroom. The next chorus shows Ula trying to use the water fountain and Rod helping her. It then cuts to some students crowded around Ula, one moves up to her and she punches him, leaving him on the crowd.

The middle eight is just the Drugs playing, then the final chorus shows the fates of the characters: Kylie becomes the HR manager of a multinational and commits suicide shortly after, Paul applies to join the New South Wales Police and gets in on his fifth application, Rod goes to Afghanistan, becomes an aid worker, finds Osama bin Laden and donates the reward money to Oxfam and Ula becomes the Supreme Overlord of the Alpha Centauri galaxy before returning to Earth to unleash a 7000 year reign of terror. The outro shows Ula with a "TELEPORT ME" sign on her back, with Rod leading her out of the school grounds.

Tracklist

References

1. ↑ Video on YouTube