Destroyer‘s upcoming LP ken is due out October 20th via Merge Records/Dead Oceans Records. Discussing the album’s title, Dan Bejar explains:
“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.’ 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.'”
“Tinseltown Swimming in Blood” is the second single from the forthcoming album, and the video for the track was directed by Karen Zolo. Inspired by Chris Marker‘s 1962 French sci-fi film La Jetée, which was created almost entirely from optically printed photographs, Zolo says:
“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…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.”
Like the original, “Tinseltown Swimming in Blood” plays as a photo montage of gorgeously realized black and white stills. With Bejar’s cosmopolitan musings to guide it, the video pulses with a sensual and electric energy.
