Dirty Projectors have been on a tear in the past couple years, after not having released a new album since 2012. Last year, they dropped their self-titled seventh album, and now they’re readying their eighth album, Lamp Lit Prose, for release in July. Today, they’ve shared a video for “That’s A Lifestyle,” a punchy a soulful indie-folk-rock track that’s accompanied by a peculiar and interesting video.
The hand-drawn video features images inspired by ancient Greek culture and mythology, and to accompany the clip, Dirty Projectors also posted a Q&A between the band’s David Longstreth and video director Kitty Faingold. In it, Faingold talks about her vision for the video:
The story is that we, the audience, are a spectral being hovering above a lake in front of a strange house that has infinite rooms. We float in through a window and decide to take a quick disembodied tour of the house that’s inhabited by a group of enchanted statues which some strange electric life force has animated for all eternity. They are the eerie marble remnants of an extinct civilization, long annihilated, the silent survivors of a by-gone atomic end time. Like dancing shadows burnt into a wall by a nuclear blast. It’s tragic but also strangely optimistic – something survived, perhaps at the end of the world, human consciousness liberated of its material constraints, spread at light speed throughout the universe, and fuzzy bundles of memory, thought and emotion seeped into inert matter in distant galaxies and parallel universes, creating the world portrayed in this animation.
The video is an imagined outcome of the story that’s sung in the song, which as I interpret it, is about a society at the cusp of destruction, looking out from itself into its past and its future and wondering will we survive? or will the monster eat its young til they’re gone.
Watch the “That’s A Lifestyle” video above.
Lamp Lit Prose is out 7/13 via Domino. Pre-order it here.
