Destroyer Shares Stunning Video For ‘Tinseltown Swimming in Blood’ New Album ken Due October 20, 2017 on Merge Records / Rhythmethod.
Watch / listen –
We are pleased to share the video for Destroyer’s new single “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood.” The video was directed by KC (aka Karen Zolo) as an adaptation of the much-revered classic film La Jetée, which addresses contemporary issues of identity, borders, and race.
ken was produced by Josh Wells of Black Mountain, who has been the drummer in Destroyer since 2012. The album was recorded in its entirety in the jam space/studio space that the group calls The Balloon Factory. However, unlike Poison Season, ken was not recorded as a “band” record, though everyone in the band does make an appearance.
“I’d just had a conversation about artist Chris Marker with a friend when I was approached to make a music video for the upcoming Destroyer album,” said Zolo. “‘You have a month.’ Okay… I had no idea what the song even sounded like, but the only idea I had was to remake Chris Marker’s La Jetée as faithfully as possible. It’s not just an homage to the great cine-poet; it’s also about the medium of film, about still photography. It would have been a billion times easier and less stressful to shoot it digitally, but it was worth it.”
ken is Dan Bejar’s 12th studio album. “Sometime last year, I discovered that the original name for ‘The Wild Ones’ (one of the great English-language ballads of the last 100 years or so) was ‘Ken,’” said Bejar. “I had an epiphany, I was physically struck by this information. In an attempt to hold on to this feeling, I decided to lift the original title of that song and use it for my own purposes. It’s unclear to me what that purpose is, or what the connection is. I was not thinking about Suede when making this record. I was thinking about the last few years of the Thatcher era. Those were the years when music first really came at me like a sickness, I had it bad. Maybe ‘The Wild Ones’ speaks to that feeling, probably why Suede made no sense in America. I think ‘ken’ also means ‘to know.’”
