Cheap Cuts x Pete Wentz Present Check Your Phone

It’s a device that has become an extension of our most personal selves. An entryway to the entire world, as both participant and spectator, at the palm of our hands. Leaving home without it is unthinkable. The desire for that new notification. The constant, almost involuntary and compulsive need to keep up to date.

Cheap Cuts presents Check Your Phone featuring Pete Wentz is a fast paced, spoken word narration of our personal relationship with our often most prized possession – our phones. What started as a social commentary about phone addiction and a typical day in the life of almost everyone with a phone, quickly evolved into a global, borderless phenomenon. And so, they made a British version. A French version. A Korean version. The song eventually caught the attention of Pete Wentz who reimagined the lyrics and wrote the lead version. The track premiered on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show and was followed by an interview with Pete and Cheap Cuts.

“The more we developed the song, translated it into different languages and then collaborated with Pete, we realised the whole world had got itself in a big anxious hurry without realising. It’s as if we all heard Baz Luhrmann’s Sunscreen at the end of the 90s, and decided to ignore every bit of advice in that song. To me, that’s what check your phone is about” add Cheap Cuts.

“It’s funny to have everything in the world in a device at the tip of my fingers and feel like it is swallowing me whole sometimes. Without a doubt, my phone has made touring, staying in touch and finding out random actors who voiced GI Joe characters from the 80s cartoon easier. But my addiction to it is complicated – the last thing I look to at night is its hazy blur, and it is the first text message that jolts me awake in the morning,” Wentz says. “To me this song is about the anxiety it gives me, but at the same time, the way I feel a bit lighter when I watch a video on it of raccoons walking around like people or whatever. It is messy and filled with complex, opposing perspectives that seem to contradict each other – just like us.”

Cheap Cuts are an electronic, shapeshifting, concept-led, rolling creative project, that harks back to the big-beat genre. With an ethos of the pop art movement, they comprise multi-platinum selling writer, producer Jonny Harris and critically acclaimed writer, producer and composer Jack Leonard. Cheap Cuts were formed last year when Jonny and Jack came together on a very special project. Working from Cheap Cuts Corp at The Ghost House, Butchers Lane in London, the pair quickly wrote first single Check Your Phone.

Pete Wentz should need no introduction. He’s got his finger on the pulse of popular culture, and indeed, the band for which he’s the lyricist and bassist, multi-platinum selling, Grammy nominated rock band, Fall Out Boy, was named for a character on The Simpsons.

Wentz also has his own jewellery line Ronin, and he owns the record label DCD2 Records which signed Panic! At The Disco. Among his recent accomplishments, he orchestrated a quarantined Fall Out Boy action figure concert, and mastered the coffee run fit. His phone addiction however, is still a work in progress.

Listen to Check Your Phone here, out now via Crush Music and Lobster Records. Watch the video here: