Blood Pressure

"Blood Pressure" is about the pressures humans are constantly under in their daily lives, from the home to the religious environment. In our interview with Mutemath drummer, Darren King, he revealed that he wrote the track's foundations: "That one started with me. I wrote the 'Why can't you be more like your older brother' and the chorus of 'Blood Pressure,' but I had very few lyrics. I don't consider myself a lyricist. I just try. I'll write pages and pages and all I'll get from it is one little line." King added that it was Mutemath front man, Paul Meany, who helped to develop the track's religious connotations: "Paul really elaborated on that idea and turned it into something that was not just about family pressure and pressure to live up to your parents' expectations or to compare yourself to your siblings' success, but it also became about the blood that the church talks about, and the pressure of living up to the verse in the bible where Jesus says, 'Greater works than me shall you do.'"

Darren King told us the song symbolizes the pressures he felt under while growing up as a strict Christian: "I put a lot of self-imposed pressure to become Christ-like, literally. And not just ask myself what Jesus would do when I get in a sticky situation, but wonder when I was finally going to raise the dead or cast the demons out of a person, or do something greater than the guy that did those things. And that's a lot of pressure for a 14-year-old guy to deal with. A 14-year-old should just be worrying about his acne and treating girls with respect and good grades and being a good kid. Instead I was thinking about when I was going to prophesize for the first time for real. And so that's part of that, too. It's that blood, as well." King said it was a scandal at his local church which lead to him changing his view on life: "Well, there was this trippy thing that happened in my church where the worship leader had got into a bit of a scandal - there was a bit of a sex scandal in my church. And that just threw my world into a tailspin. That happened in my senior year of high school in 1999 and 2000. And that was my first major depression in that regard. I had all the expectations built up from my leadership, and I felt so confused. I myself went through a very dark time in that. And then I rebounded from that, again, back into a more hopeful – again – church-going, optimistic kid in my mid-20s, but still very different. From that point on, I was very different. I felt that was one step towards me being a bit more reasonable and not being so intense."

Claire Marie Vogel directed the video along with Darren King. It was shot in one night and edited to appear stop-motion.