Many songs cut from an album never resurface; they usually sit on a hard drive while the band moves on to the next project. However, Ramsey Elkholy took a different approach with his song, “You Don’t Care.” He originally wrote the track in 2024, watched it miss the cut for his album Waiting for You, and held onto it for two years because he knew it needed a different setting. This fall, it arrives as a single, accompanied by a video shot entirely against a green screen.
The Collective Ramsey Elkholy Built
Elkholy is a guitarist, producer, songwriter, and anthropologist who founded Monotronic in 2016 as an indietronica collective with a deliberately changing lineup. The name reflects the idea behind the project: different instruments and musicians coming together to form a new musical iteration. Each musician brings their own textures and ideas, which helps explain why one Monotronic record can sound quite different from the next.
A native New Yorker, Elkholy works out of a home garage he’s converted into a studio. Over the years, that setup has brought together musicians who’ve recorded with Daft Punk, Joe Jackson, Chic, and Dweezil Zappa. It also shapedWaiting for You, the album Monotronic released in January 2026, with Omar Hakim playing drums throughout.
There isn’t a rigid formula for what a Monotronic song is supposed to sound like. That’s part of the appeal. Elkholy gives the musicians around him room to contribute, and the project changes as those contributions evolve.
The Song that Didn’t Fit the Album
Eleven songs made Waiting for You. “You Don’t Care” wasn’t one of them, but that had nothing to do with the quality of the song.
“The vibe of the song was so different from the other eleven songs that ended up on the album,” Elkholy says. Putting it into the tracklist would’ve changed the feel of the record, so he left it off and waited for a place where it could stand on its own.
The story at the center of “You Don’t Care” is familiar enough. A man realizes that the person he’s dating has already moved on, leaving him to wonder what happened and where things went wrong. Pop music has been mining that territory forever.
What makes Elkholy’s version more interesting is what happens when the song leaves the headphones and moves onto a screen. The visual treatment takes the basic idea of emotional disconnection and puts it somewhere much stranger.
Two Videos, Two Very Different Approaches
Monotronic shot two videos in Austin within the same stretch of days, one for “Photograph” and one for “You Don’t Care.” On paper, they’re simply two videos for two songs from the same project. In practice, they couldn’t have been more different.
“Photograph” was loose and built around real locations. The band rented an Airbnb for the day, shot a scene at an Austin country-western bar called The Wheel, and picked up additional footage around the city. They could move quickly, work with what was around them, and let the locations become part of the video.
That’s exactly what happened. The finished footage has the feel of a real place because it is one. You see the bar, the sidewalks, and the streets of Austin, and the city becomes part of the story without having to be deliberately explained.
“You Don’t Care” needed something else. Elkholy wanted control over what appeared in the frame, which meant a real location wasn’t going to give him enough freedom. The band booked Originator Studios in Austin and moved the shoot onto a stage.
From there, the real world essentially disappeared.
Building a World in Post
Elkholy’s visual references for “You Don’t Care” included 2001: A Space Odyssey and Ex Machina, so the direction was pretty clear. He wanted something cold and futuristic, with an environment that felt carefully constructed.
The entire video was shot against a green screen. The backgrounds and environments were created later in post-production, meaning none of the world surrounding the performers actually existed when the cameras were rolling.
That approach gives a filmmaker plenty of control, but it also puts more pressure on the idea itself. When you’re shooting on location, the environment can give you something unexpected to work with. With a green screen, you have to know what you’re building toward. If the concept doesn’t hold together once you add the digital backgrounds, there’s nowhere for the production to hide.
The story has some of the same qualities as Ex Machina: an artificial creation and the person responsible for creating her, placed inside a futuristic world. It also has a Frankenstein-like quality, taking an old story about creation and giving it a distinctly modern setting.
That setup works particularly well with the song. “You Don’t Care” is about the realization that someone you care about has emotionally moved on. The video places that feeling inside a world of artificial environments and manufactured intelligence.
The result doesn’t simply illustrate the lyrics. It gives the song another way to be understood.
Letting each Song Find its own World
What’s interesting about the two Austin shoots is that Elkholy wasn’t trying to make them look like parts of the same visual package. There isn’t a single Monotronic house style that every song has to fit.
Instead, the song seems to determine the treatment.
“Photograph” needed real streets, a real bar, and the loose energy that comes with shooting on location. “You Don’t Care” needed a controlled stage and an environment that could be built from scratch. Making both videos follow the same formula would’ve taken something away from each one.
The same instinct explains why “You Don’t Care” didn’t make the cut for Waiting for You.
Elkholy could’ve found a place for it on the album. There were only so many tracks, though, and the song was moving in a noticeably different direction than the other eleven. Putting it into the sequence simply because there was room for another song wouldn’t have solved the problem.
So he waited.
Two years later, that decision has given “You Don’t Care” a chance to exist on its own terms. The song gets its own release, its own visual language, and a world built specifically around it.
For Ramsey Elkholy, that’s a fitting next step for a project that has always left room for experimentation. “You Don’t Care” arrives this fall, six years after Monotronic’s 2019 debut and the praise that followed from Rolling Stone, Relix, and Rock Cellar.
This time, the song doesn’t have to fit anywhere else. It gets its own space — and a visual world built specifically for it.