Are you one of the cursed souls enduring this pandemic cooped up in quarantine with restless rugrats? LoCO feels your pain and has arranged for some empathetic rapping dads to provide you with a moment of levity this morning.

After a few musically inactive years, Northern Humboldt-based hip hop duo Area Sound have reemerged with an album of new material called Squeeze the Elephant, a laidback affair full of rhymes celebrating grown-up decisions and North Coast life. These days, both of the group’s members, Liam “Steamer” Nelson and Zach “Zigzilla” Lehner, are pursuing careers — Nelson is a carpenter while Lehner teaches at Zane Middle School. Both have young children at home and their new music reflects their family-focused existences. 

“We used to do lots of local shows 6 to 8 years ago, but have been laying low raising kids for a while,” Lehner told the Outpost. 

In that spirit, today exclusively on LoCO, Area Sound drops the album’s first music video, “Glamorous Lifestyle.” The clip is packed with relatable scenes chronicling the joys of fatherhood and features our protagonists dutifully folding laundry, building cardboard forts and instigating water fights during a neighborhood backyard barbecue. (Cool your jets, e-hall monitors. The video was shot long before shelter-in-place orders were a thing.) 

While the video and album have been in the works for months, Nelson feels honored to be able to release it during such strange times.

“It is a bit of a silver lining for us that due to the shelter-in-place order everybody is probably online a lot more than usual and in need of a little positive and lighthearted distraction from all the bad news and isolation,” he said. “Hopefully people dig the video and the album!”

If you, for some reason, have not clicked play on “Glamorous Lifestyle” yet, well, what are you waiting for? Do that, please. If you like what you experience, you can listen to the entirety of Area Sound’s Squeeze the Elephant on a host of streaming services or can purchase it on Amazon Music.