Burlington's Brunch Drop Double A-Side Singles 'Please Kill Me' and 'Man Alive'

Burlington, VT rock band Brunch released two new singles today, August 13, 2026: "Please Kill Me" and "Man Alive," billed as a double A-side. The band is Philip Bern (guitar), Mason Kosman (bass), Ayden Flanigan (drums), and Cameron Mincar (guitar).

The release arrives after their 2024 EP DOGINYA and 2025 live EP Live at Robot Dog. Their 2023 debut album Parasocial was produced by Urian Hackney, whose credits include work with Iggy Pop, Interpol, and the Armed.

"Please Kill Me" takes its name from the oral history of classic punk and, according to the band, weaves together references to Phil Spector's Wall of Sound production style, synthesizers across multiple eras, and Marxist-influenced lyrical commentary on nostalgia and cultural memory. "The song sounds almost like it could belong to any decade without exactly belonging to any of them," the band says.

A music video for the track, shot in a home-movie style at Devil's Bowl Speedway in Vermont, is out now. The band performed live on the track after a race, setting up in their van at the center of the dirt circuit. They describe the shoot: "Halfway through the race there was a huge four car pileup that took a construction crew 30 minutes to remove from the track while everyone watched. You can see in the video our reactions to the crash and the clean-up, the cars were totaled but thankfully none of the drivers were hurt. After the race the owners let us out onto the tracks in our van and we set up right in the middle and played along to the song."

"Man Alive" takes a different direction, layering a synthwave texture over what the band describes as a dark, romantic rock track. The song draws on the work of Jorge Luis Borges, David Lynch, James Joyce, and Haruki Murakami. "It's about struggling with the difficulties of being a human while holding onto radical hopefulness and love for others," the band explains. "It's a song about radical antagonisms; light and darkness, dreams and reality, each defining itself by its own opposite."

Brunch are celebrating the release tonight with a show at Purgatory in Brooklyn, NY.

For independent artists building a body of work across formats, Brunch's move to pair a conceptually linked double A-side with a low-budget, location-shot video is a practical example of how to keep visual and sonic releases tightly connected without a major label budget behind them.

Brunch formed at the University of Vermont during the COVID-19 pandemic. All four members share songwriting and lead vocal duties.