Tom Morello has a new single on the way, and the story behind it reaches back to occupied Europe.
The Rage Against The Machine guitarist will release “Date Night” on Tuesday, July 28, and has shared a teaser clip previewing the track. As the teaser explains, the song takes its inspiration from three young women — Freddie Oversteegen, her sister Truus Oversteegen and Hannie Schaft — who fought the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands during World War II, in part by luring German officers and collaborators to their deaths.
The three belonged to the Haarlem Council of Resistance and became some of the most striking figures of the Dutch underground.
Their most notorious tactic used the enemy’s assumptions against him: posing as harmless young women, they would draw German officers and Dutch collaborators away to isolated spots, where the men were killed. Freddie Oversteegen was recruited at around 14 and, by many accounts, was the first of the group to kill. But seduction was only one method. The trio also carried out the harder, more conventional work of armed resistance — shooting targets, blowing up bridges and rail lines, ferrying weapons and helping hide Jewish families from deportation.
It came at a cost. The Oversteegen sisters lived to see the war’s end, but Schaft did not. Known to the occupiers as “the girl with the red hair” and placed on their most-wanted list, she was captured and executed by shooting on April 17, 1945 — only weeks before the Netherlands was liberated. She was 24. Decades later she and the sisters were formally honored for their wartime service.
Theirs is not a comic-book story, though it has sometimes been flattened into one online. It was dangerous, morally heavy work carried out by people barely out of childhood, and one of them paid for it with her life.
“Date Night” fits a clear throughline in Morello‘s recent solo output, which has leaned hard into explicitly anti-fascist themes. It follows “Adjourn It“, his collaboration with System Of A Down‘s Serj Tankian, which drew on a similar well of resistance to authoritarianism.
For Morello, a lifelong political activist as much as a guitarist, with Rage Against The Machine, Audioslave, Prophets Of Rage and a deep solo catalogue behind him, reaching for a true story of ordinary people fighting fascism is squarely in character.
The single can be pre-saved now via tommorello.lnk.to/datenight.
