"Freaks" is a song by American

surf rock Surf music (also known as surf rock, surf pop, or surf guitar) is a genre of rock music associated with surf culture, particularly as found in Southern California. It was especially popular from 1958 to 1964 in two major forms. The first is inst ...

band

Surf Curse Surf Curse is an American Indie rock, indie Surf music, surf rock band formed in 2012 in Reno, Nevada, and now based in Los Angeles. The band was formed by Nick Rattigan (lead vocals and drums) and Jacob Rubeck (guitars), and now also includes ...

. It was originally released in 2013, from the band's first studio album ''

Buds In botany, a bud is an undeveloped or Plant embryogenesis, embryonic Shoot (botany), shoot and normally occurs in the axil of a leaf or at the tip of a Plant stem, stem. Once formed, a bud may remain for some time in a dormancy, dormant conditi ...

''. The song was re-released as a single on May 15, 2021, via

Atlantic Records Atlantic Recording Corporation (simply known as Atlantic Records) is an American record label founded in October 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun and Herb Abramson. Over the course of its first two decades, starting from the release of its first recor ...

. The song later went viral in mid-2021, seeing mass use on social media platforms like

Tiktok TikTok, known in mainland China and Hong Kong as Douyin (), is a social media and Short-form content, short-form online video platform owned by Chinese Internet company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which may range in duration f ...

Content

The band wrote the song in 2011, but in 2021, the song garnered attention due to Internet memes, gaining more than 200,000 views on TikTok and 200 million streams. Responding to the viral memes, the band's guitarist Jacob Rubeck told ''American Songwriter'': "It's a very strange trajectory. It's been a strange wave". He also described "Freaks" as "a pretty depressing song, but there are a lot of depressed people out there, and people who feel alienated". Adam Schulz, the band's A&R rep at Atlantic, told ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'': "When I heard 'Freaks' for the first time, the thing that stood out to me was how exhilarating the song is, that energy is consistent across the band's catalog, and once you watch videos of the band performing live, you realize it translates even better in real life." A rerecorded version of the track was featured in ''

Rock Band 4 ''Rock Band 4'' is a 2015 rhythm game developed and published by Harmonix. The game was initially distributed by Mad Catz, who also developed new instrument controllers for the game, for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 6, 2015. Performanc ...

'' as purchasable DLC content. This rerecord is currently unavailable on streaming services.

Music video

An accompanying music video was released on August 6, 2021, and directed by the band itself. It features the same rerecorded version as in the ''Rock Band 4'' DLC. They talked about the video via ''TV News Desk'': "We never had any intention to make a music video for 'Freaks', but when the opportunity occurred we knew what it needed to be, we had to make a video set in Charles Burns' ''

Black Hole A black hole is a massive, compact astronomical object so dense that its gravity prevents anything from escaping, even light. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. Th ...

'' world, which originally inspired the song. We were lucky to cast our friends and put them in this mutant makeup. We were lucky to capture great moments on film and had an opportunity to make an ode to a graphic novel that heavily inspired us."

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications

Release history

References

{{Surf Curse 2013 songs 2021 singles Atlantic Records singles Surf Curse songs Internet memes introduced in 2021