Will Jones
Photo Courtesy of Monotronic
The first image Ramsey Elkholy had in mind for Monotronic’s new single came from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Outer space isn’t something a band can rent for an afternoon, so the New York guitarist, songwriter, and producer moved the entire “You Don’t Care” shoot onto a green screen stage and built its world in post-production. The single arrives October 2, and the video shows how much thought Elkholy puts into what a song looks like as well as how it sounds.
Two shoots, two philosophies
Monotronic filmed two videos in Austin within the same few days, and they couldn’t have been made more differently.
The first, for “Photograph,” was loose and quick. The band rented a house for the day, filmed a scene at The Wheel, a country and western bar, and grabbed extra footage around the city. The locations did half the work. Streets and storefronts showed up on camera because they were already there, and the video feels lived in because it was.
“You Don’t Care” was a different vision altogether. Elkholy pictured a cold, engineered world with outer space at its edges, and nothing in Austin could stand in for it. The band booked Originator Studios, put everyone on a stage in front of a green screen, and saved the backgrounds for post-production.
“The decision to shoot the whole video in the studio against a green screen was a practical consideration: creating the sets for what I had in my mind would not have been practical,” Elkholy says. “Starting with an image of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey lent itself to green screen, where outer-space scenes can be created with surprising accuracy.”
It’s a harder way to make a video. On location, a filmmaker can get lucky: a stranger walks through the shot, the light shifts at the right moment, and a thin idea suddenly has texture. A green screen stage offers none of that help. Everything the audience eventually sees has to be planned in advance, and if the concept falls apart once the digital sets go in, there’s nowhere to hide it.
Heartbreak in a manufactured world
Alongside Kubrick, Elkholy drew on Ex Machina. The video tells the story of a female android and the man who built her, inside an environment that feels engineered down to the light.
The song underneath is simple. A man realizes the person he’s with has already moved on emotionally, and he’s left trying to find the moment it happened. Put that lyric inside a story about a created being, and it starts to ask a colder question: what if the person who doesn’t care was never who you thought they were, only the version you’d built up in your mind? There’s an old Frankenstein thread running through it too, the maker who can’t get the response he wants from what he made.
It’s a smart match. The more controlled the world on screen, the more exposed the feeling at its center.
Waiting for the right time
“You Don’t Care” had such a distinct vibe that it made more sense to release it as a single. Elkholy wrote it in 2024 for Waiting for You, the 11-track album Monotronic released in January 2026, but its mood pulled away from the rest of the record. Rather than force it into a sequence where it didn’t belong, the song waited two years for a release of its own.
Other Monotronic songs have taken their time, too. “Sun Song” began as a guitar riff that sat unfinished for months.
“I had been playing the opening guitar riff on the sofa for many months without any lyrics or concept,” Elkholy says. “I think I was riffing on Nirvana’s ‘All Apologies’ initially, which then morphed into something else.”
That song eventually gave the album its name through an outro lyric. “You Don’t Care” needed even longer to find its place, and the wait gave it a release, a video, and a visual language of its own.
The collective behind the sound
Elkholy founded Monotronic in 2016 as an indietronica collective with a rotating lineup. The model traces back to his years abroad. He backpacked for two years, studied Indian music in Calcutta, and then spent two years living with the Orang Rimba in the rainforests of Sumatra, Indonesia, a community where the group comes before the individual. In Monotronic, every player who joins a session brings their own textures, which is why one record can sound noticeably different from the next.
The players have serious résumés. Musicians who’ve recorded with Daft Punk, Joe Jackson, Chic, and Dweezil Zappa have played on Monotronic sessions [VERIFY with Ramsey], and Omar Hakim played drums across Waiting for You. Earlier singles “Kids of Summer” and “Buy Yourself a Dream” earned radio airplay, and both videos premiered at No. 1 on VEVO’s Incoming Indie playlist. Relix, IM Music Magazine, EDM Movement, Hype Magazine, and Rock Cellar have all written about the band.
For listeners who come to Monotronic through Phoenix, Tame Impala, MGMT, Beck, or The Postal Service, “You Don’t Care” sits comfortably in that company: synth-forward, rhythmic, and more melancholy than it first lets on.
“You Don’t Care” is out October 2. Watch and listen at monotronicband.com, read more about Ramsey Elkholy atramseyelkholyny.com and ramsey-elkholy.com, and follow Monotronic on Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, and TikTok.