Death Cab For Cutie have shared the official video for ‘Roman Candles’, the first track to be released from their upcoming tenth studio album, ‘Asphalt Meadows’.
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“‘Roman Candles’ is about the crippling, existential dread that goes hand in hand with living in a nervous city on a dying planet. And that the only way to be in the moment is to let it all go,” the band said of the album’s first single.
Frontman Ben Gibbard added: “The lyrics were cobbled from a couple of different songs dealing with my general sense of anxiety; the feeling that the fabric that weaves a functioning society together was crumbling during the pandemic.”
The video has been directed by filmmaker Lance Bangs, who is known for his work with the likes of Sonic Youth, Nirvana and Kanye West. It was shot in one take and stars the entire band wearing safety goggles and gas masks, as what look like fireworks go off around them.
The band are then met with fire extinguishers and fire blankets at the end, as Gibbard notes: “Oh man, I think we got it!”
“We’ve known Lance for years and it was great to get a chance to work with him again,” Gibbard said of working with Bangs. “He took this concept I had come up with and made it better than we could ever have imagined. The dude is brilliant and a total blast to work with.”
‘Asphalt Meadows’ is the follow-up to 2018’s ‘Thank You For Today’ and will be released on September 16 via Atlantic.
The band’s last release came in the form of ‘The Georgia EP’, a collection of five covers which came out in 2020 via Bandcamp and was later made available on streaming platforms. A newly remastered 35-track reissue of their LP ‘The Photo Album’ also arrived last year.
Death Cab For Cutie are due to play a run of US headline shows this summer, with an additional date scheduled for New York’s Forest Hills Stadium on September 30. You can purchase any remaining tickets here.
