Destroyer has released a new music video for “Crimson Tide”, the lead single from the Canadian art’s forthcoming LP, Have We Met, due January 31, 2020.
In typical Dan Bejar fashion, “Crimson Tide” is a melancholy mover, its concerns whisked along by a driving beat, rumbling bass, and a whimsical piano. The track comes as the band’s first new song since 2017’s ken and is only the group’s eighth video since their formation in ’95.
Speaking on the video’s cinematic elements, director David Galloway had this to say:
Do you like the 1985 politico-dance-thriller White Nights? What about John Hughes’ controversial 1986 proleteeniat love letter to the hoi polloi, Pretty In Pink? What do these seminal films of the 1980s have to do with Destroyer’s overture to 2020, Have We Met? They are canonized not only by their groundbreaking and visionary contributions to Hollywood; they are escorted by the rarefied but much-maligned “movie tie-in music video.” So this is like that, only a little bit different. I don’t know if this particular movie is a “movie” in the traditional sense of the trope, and I don’t know if there will be a soundtrack. There might be a bootleg mix-tape, though.
That movie is Ashcroft: an ambiguous short, an art-house film that explores time, memory, fruit, the landscape of the British Columbia interior, and recovery from – and into – deception. “Ashcroft is not a place of passive rest, but rather an intoxicating playground for excavation and manipulation” is a quote from the filmmakers’ press release. Movies need songs [kind of] and songs need movies [videos?]. This is a music video about a movie, or for a movie, or really just with a movie. The point is: they love each other. With “Crimson Tide”, Destroyer introduces listeners to yet another version of the Bejar Enigma and ushers viewers to seats in an alternate cinematic universe. The dramatic music video that ties in to film is a lost art. Or maybe it’s just a vulgar one. Either way, there are no rotten tomatoes here. Only rotten apples.
