The Federal Empire (Chad Wolf and McKay Stevens) are premiering their new video for “I Never Liked Your Friends” exclusively via Billboard today (July 18). Additionally, the band has announced their new partnership with Sumerian Records.
The video features Lindsey Sterling and Twilight’s BooBoo Stewart and takes place at a party for the seemingly-entitled birthday girl, Steph. As her friends beg the band to play, they finally do, except the main lyric in the chorus is “I Never Liked Your Friends” so naturally, they catch on and feel offended. As the story progresses, Steph’s friends throw a whole cake in Wolf’s face and a fight breaks out, but the band keeps on playing.
The artists never planned on being a band; yhe two originally connected to write songs for other artists but then decided some songs were too good to give away. “We started this as just writers looking to send some songs out for cuts,” Wolf tells Billboard. “I was finishing a third Carolina Liar record and Mckay had just settled into staying in Los Angeles as a writer from a Grammy nom. So we had no idea that this was the path three years ago.”
“We realized the songs meant something more to us than just ‘cuts,’ so we came up with the name The Federal Empire because we were doing these huge gang vocal arrangements and there is a definition of federal that refers to the meaning as a public place where many voices can come together to form one,” Wolf adds. “To us, that was everything we were doing, and if this was going to be a band, our intention was to bring people like us together and laugh about our lives.”
“It’s super lowkey, where we will meet up at someone’s house and just talk about life and relationships and then get into the writing,” Stevens says of the group’s sessions. “All of these are true stories and come from authentic places of what we’ve been through.”
A deluxe edition of the duo’s debut EP, The American Dream, is also coming soon via Sumerian Records.
Watch the new video below.