Indie rock titans the Fleet Foxes have released the first single from their highly anticipated sophomore album, Helplessness Blues. And it finds the Foxes in a something of a contrarian state. Where most rock bands and songwriters tend to celebrate individuality in various modes — rebellion, standing up for yourself, etc — the Fleet Foxes use “Helplessness Blues” to extol the virtues of being, well, “a functioning cog in some great machinery, serving something beyond me.”

Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues by subpop

Say what? Are you sure you guys don’t want to “break free” of the system and all that? No? Really? You’d rather devote your life to hard labor? Okay:

If I had an orchard
I’d work till I’m raw
If i had an orchard
I’d work till I’m sore

And you would wait tables
And sing around the store.

The song is pretty fascinating for that reason — it’s an explicit call to finding happiness in doing your lot, for the betterment of society (or, I suppose, God), and discarding the rugged individuality that’s been en vogue ever since rock songs started being written. Sure, there are plenty of “back-to-the-land” style folk songs that glorifying a simple life of hard work, but rarely is there such a distinct desire to work to help that great machine — the functioning society — in lieu of self-preservation.

Then again, if ever you could imagine a major band living in some commune outside of Seattle, it’d be the flannel-clad, cheerily egalitarian Foxes here. Their song, and its apparent advocacy for collectivist values, reminds me of Brian Eno’s ecological thinking. Eno wrote that ecology is the most important idea to humankind, since it enabled us to view the world’s social and natural systems not as hierarchies, but as complex webs where every entity plays a necessary role. This kind of thinking allows us to direct our respect as much to sanitation workers as we do to celebrities or the upper management of a tech firm.

The foxes paint an idyllic alternative to a world where everyone’s concerned with their “station” and obsessed with self-preservation. Is “Helplessness Blues” an actual call to communist-style living? I don’t know if I’d go that far — but it certainly expounds on the virtues of recognizing we’re all part of a great collective that demands sublime cooperation to keep afloat.