Today, Destroyer proudly shares a new video for “It Just Doesn’t Happen” the second single from the Canadian outfit’s upcoming album Have We Met due on January 31, 2020. The vocals from lead singer Dan Bejar, initially sparsely accompanied by a guitar, sound as if they’re coming from a PA system. When the chorus hits, a thrumming bassline and percussion arrive to carry him forward.
Where the visuals for previous single “Crimson Tide” featured Bejar and various slices of life, “It Just Doesn’t Happen” hardly features any “visuals” at all. A lone snowmobiler travels through the night, only the light of their vehicle illuminating any of the surrounding area. The traveler meets a number of figures along the way, but largely spends their journey alone on in the frigid, dark night.
Slightly foreboding yet comforting in its delivery, “It Just Doesn’t Happen” plays into Bejar’s initial vision for Have We Met as a Y2K album. A statement from the band confirms “the songs do seem to point at a very modern dread—one that heightens the more you consider it.”
Atmosphere and loose approximations of a place or feeling are what we’ve come to expect from any new Destroyer record— certainly not an easily defined and stridently adhered to theme or concept. Have We Met manages to meet somewhere between those disparate Y2K reference points and Destroyer’s own area of expertise, gliding deftly into territory that marries the old strident Destroyer with the new, aged crooning one of late.
DESTROYER/ DAN BEJAR ONLINE
