Lancaster, Pennsylvania duo American Motors announce their second album, Functional Music, set for release on 6th November via Expert Work / TGIC / Vina, alongside the release of its lead single No Horses and an atmospheric new music video. The follow-up to 2024’s Content finds Dustin White, Alex Steward and Brad Williams pushing further into the distinctive world they established on their debut, expanding its themes while allowing more room for experimentation, repetition and carefully constructed space.
American Motors
No Horses arrives accompanied by a film shot inside the Large Scale Systems Museum in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, with White directing and operating the camera himself. The location, packed with working vintage computer terminals and mainframes, provides an appropriately strange and faded setting for a song concerned with memory, place and the uneasy relationship between the past and the present.
The video was shot on an Arriflex 16ST 16mm camera using expired Kodak Eastman film stock. White taught himself how to operate the vintage equipment specifically for the project, sourcing the second-hand camera and shooting test reels before turning it on the band.
The resulting footage has a distinctly archival quality. Grey filing cabinets, suited figures and the heavy grain of the 16mm film create the impression of an office frozen somewhere in the late 1980s, while the collection of genuine period technology reinforces the song’s fascination with an increasingly distant technological past. Among the machines appearing in the video is a Data General “Dasher” terminal, which provided the visual inspiration for the computers seen in Severance, alongside hardware including a VAX-11/780 and an IBM System/390 mainframe.
For White, the museum provided the perfect environment for translating the ideas behind ‘No Horses’ into images. “No Horses takes place mostly out on Route 60 just outside St Albans, WV, the same stretch that ‘(A Billboard Reading) Dissolve Jefferson’ from our first LP does,” he explains.
The song also reflects one of American Motors’ favourite musical techniques, with guitar and bass interacting around deceptively simple repeated figures. “As a band, one of our favorite things to do is have either the guitar or bass play essentially one note while the other moves around. Here we do both.”
The decision to shoot on vintage film completes the connection between the song’s subject matter and its visual presentation. “To keep with the antiquated technology vibe, we shot the whole thing on a 1960s Arriflex 16ST 16mm camera,” says White. “I’m honestly surprised we pulled it off.”
That fascination with the physical remnants of earlier eras runs throughout Functional Music, but the album isn’t simply an exercise in nostalgia. Where Content constructed a portrait of a world seemingly in decay, its successor turns its attention towards the people forced to navigate that environment.
The characters inhabiting Functional Music include waitresses, nomads and young people exposed to catastrophe before they are old enough to fully understand it. American Motors draw inspiration from the world of New Hollywood cinema, particularly filmmakers such as Sam Peckinpah, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich, approaching individual songs almost like cinematic scenes in which everyday situations gradually take on a darker or more expansive significance. That cinematic quality is complemented by the duo’s deeply rooted sense of place.
White grew up in West Virginia, and Appalachian imagery and experience have remained an important part of American Motors’ writing. One example is ‘5480 Big Tyler’, whose title comes from a slumlord-owned apartment complex from White’s childhood.
That personal history sits alongside White’s decades of experience within the wider independent music community. A longtime musician and “indie lifer”, he has played in or worked front-of-house for artists including Pink Mountaintops, Times New Viking, Sea Wolf and Dead Meadow. On Functional Music, that accumulated experience moves to the forefront, informing a record that feels simultaneously lived-in and deliberately experimental.
The album was recorded with producer J. Robbins at Magpie Cage, continuing the relationship established during the creation of the band’s debut. Robbins’ own history in post-hardcore, alongside the studio’s recording pedigree, gives American Motors an environment in which they can push their sound without losing its physicality.
Magpie Cage has previously hosted recordings by artists including Shudder to Think, Girls Against Boys and Brainiac, and American Motors approached the studio as another instrument in the process rather than simply somewhere to capture performances.
For White, returning to work with Robbins was a major part of the record’s development. “Making the first record, we established a conceptual framework to work inside of. This time we’re adding more detail inside that framework, and pushing against it slightly,” he says. “We made some bigger swings in a few spots, but still just did what we do, which is basically whatever Alex and I find interesting. We’re still interested in experimenting with empty space and repetition.”
That willingness to follow instinct rather than conform to a fixed formula appears central to American Motors’ approach. Functional Music expands the parameters established on Content while remaining rooted in the same curiosity that brought the duo together. “Working with J again was an absolute dream,” White adds. “No band I’ve been in has managed to release a second LP while still continuing to function as a band, so this feels like a major accomplishment.”
His description of the album neatly captures its broader perspective: “It’s a little more interior to the exterior of the first LP. It’s a society, and we’re just living in it.”
That sense of observation is what gives Functional Music its particular atmosphere. Rather than simply documenting societal decline, American Motors focus on the people, routines and environments that exist within it. The mundane becomes significant, while familiar places and objects acquire new meaning when viewed through the passage of time.
No Horses is a particularly strong example of that approach, connecting a specific stretch of West Virginia road to a collection of obsolete machines in a Pennsylvania museum. The result is a song and video that look backwards while remaining firmly concerned with the present.
Following the release of Functional Music, American Motors will head out on the road in October alongside onelinedrawing, the long-running project of former Far frontman Jonah Matranga. Matranga will be touring his album …The Music— with the run marking its 30th anniversary — while American Motors join selected East Coast dates. The run begins in Boston on 22nd October before continuing through Syracuse, Long Island, Rutherford, Baltimore and Philadelphia, giving audiences across the East Coast an opportunity to experience American Motors’ evolving sound in a live setting.
With Functional Music, the duo appear to be widening the conceptual world introduced by Content without abandoning the strange, spacious and exploratory qualities that made their debut so distinctive. No Horses provides the first substantial glimpse of that next chapter: a song rooted in place and repetition, accompanied by a film built from obsolete technology and analogue imperfections. It is a fitting introduction to a record concerned with what remains when the future imagined by previous generations fails to arrive quite as expected.
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