The Domestics, an indie punk band from Portland, Oregon, got a little too creative with a recent viral marketing campaign.
The band sent a cassette tape marked “Trump/Comey Recordings” to music industry professionals and other outlets—and have faced immediate backlash for the stunt.
According to a statement posted to their Facebook page, the band said they’d been pitched the idea by their label, Tender Loving Empire, who had recently purchased the URL trumpcomeytapes.com. The label wanted to “create a fake Trump/Comey cassette tape to send out to select contacts, and along with it a trail of breadcrumbs for a curious mind to follow.” The packages the band sent also included a link to a website, where recipients could hear audio of the band mixed with quotes from the president and someone else speaking Russian, according to Paste.
The band says the package was sent to roughly 60 different outlets—including some right-wing ones—with return addresses to Infowars, the KKK, and Westboro Baptist Church.
This, all to promote the imminent release of its latest album, Little Darkness, which comes out on Sept. 1.
But having sent the packages out so close to the deadly Charlottesville protest, not everyone that received them got the joke. “Today it blew up,” wrote the band, “and our inbox was flooded with emails asking if we were behind the tapes and for our comments. There was talks of reports being made to the FBI about these actually being the real tapes. I also got two emails that suggested somehow Jewish individuals in the music industry were specifically targeted in the distribution of this tape which is totally not the case.”
Read the band’s full statement below:
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