EXTREME Shares 'Save Me' Music Video

EXTREME has released the official music video for the song "Save Me". The track is taken from the band's latest album, "Six", which came out in June 2023 via earMUSIC.

EXTREME guitarist Nuno Bettencourt comments: "This video was shot with a very claustrophobic feel to show the raw emotion of the heavy subject matter of the song. It was important to shoot it this way to create a lack of oxygen in a black void as if 'we' are the voices in your heads… in our own heads, to visually put across the psychological battle of whispers and screams we have all dealt with in coping with life's challenges."

Gary Cherone's schizophrenic vocals in the verses is the dark narrator in our heads, taunting and pushing us to a dangerous edge… whereas in the refrain, his impassioned plea — "Save me from myself / Save me from this hell…" — is our voice that is screaming in our heads but often painfully silent on the outside.

Nuno explains: "The viewer sometimes can't tell where one face ends and the other begins. Like we are small pieces of a human jigsaw puzzle… with one rule… that we will never see the full finished puzzle."

Reaching a crescendo with Nuno's stinging solo, the video ultimately ends in a dark place, but as Nuno and Gary intended, it is a song of hope… in a dark reality.

"YOU ARE NOT ALONE. There is always someone to call when all seems hopeless," they say.

"Six" landed at position No. 10 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart with first-week sales of 12,500 copies. The set marked the band's first studio album since 2008. The act was last in the Top 10 with "III Sides To Every Story", which debuted and peaked at No. 10 back in October 1992.

Last year, Nuno told Tiago Ribeiro, that he was thrilled with how "Six" turned out. "I would put our album up against anybody's album; I feel that confident," Nuno said. "And I think the album itself — never mind me or EXTREME — if I heard that album and it wasn't us, I would think the same way I think about the album now. I think it belongs there. I think it's a well-made album. I think the songs are there. I think that the musicianship, the chemistry and the guitar playing. But I think, more importantly, what's really there and what people are connecting with is the mythology of rock and roll. I think that's really what's missing a lot in guitar-driven music, is that…

"I think when people saw a guitar player that's in a band with songs and arrangements and the videos and everything, it was almost like seeing something that… People are saying it's so fresh, but for us, it's, like, this is like going back for us," he explained. "This is more of a reminder than it is anything else that you can still be passionate and have fire and do all those things. And the people are letting us know that they're starved — they're starved for rock and roll like this, I think."

Last September, Nuno told American Musical Supply about the long delay in getting "Six" released: "The recording [of 'Six'], a lot of people are saying like, 'Man, [it took] 15 years,' obviously, minus a few of the handmaid's tale years, pandemic years. But the album itself probably, if you add it up, it took the same length as an album takes to record. It didn’t take 15 years to record the album. It's just that we probably had, like, three albums' worth of material. The guys kept coming out to L.A., and we would do a crop of songs, and we'd write another crop of songs or record another couple crop of songs."

Bettencourt went on to say that he and his EXTREME bandmates had "set a bar" for themselves. "You really have to be super proud and super excited to share your music with anybody, even if it's your brother or it's your family member or if it's Tom Morello that you happen to know," he explained. "Once you have that feeling of, 'Would you play these songs in front of your peers?', then you kind of know you got something there and you're ready to go."