“You Look Lost” by New Lungs | Song Premiere

New Lungs was in stitches the moment they knew the spoken intro to their new single would work out.

Listen to the first ten seconds of “You Look Lost,” and it’s no wonder. The punk rock just tramples over of the self-help audio clip. For starters, there’s the smiling, but emphatic, irony of its pairing with the charging, no-frills rock of New Lungs. It’s a band that’s posture is an absolute given, a consideration they’ve probably never had to make: good humor, straight shoulders and banging heads.

“Obviously, we’re trying to play tight,” singer/guitarist Danny Maxwell says. “But the song’s about not having good posture, I guess.”

Maxwell says “You Look Lost” gestures at well-known local custom of stumbling home drunk from Benson, “dragging your feet all the way.” It’s aggressively in the second person, but Maxwell notes it’s a song for anyone who’s taken the walk, himself included.

“It’s more sarcastic, but it comes off a little angry,” he says.

In its few years of existence New Lungs — which comprises member of Omaha bands Little Brazil, The Fucking Party, This Just In, Art In Manila and La Casa Bombas — has worked methodically, releasing an EP last year and this new, one-off single. In 2011, Maxwell told Hear Nebraska that New Lungs was open to unorthodox kinds of songwriting, perhaps alluding to the hip-hop-esque inclusion of intros like the one you hear on “You Look Lost.”

Granted, he notes, that’s a hard way to write, but the residue of those experimental snippets remains.

Without further adieu, here’s the premiere, as well as a bonus recording from Live at O’Leaver’s: