alt-J – Deadcrush
2017 · Directed by Young Replicant
231K Likes
Best comments
1.“When I forget the name of this song and try to sing it to people, they think I'm smoking crack.”
More comments
- 2.“Lee Miller, Anne Boleyn and Sylvia Plath – the 'dead crushes' of each band member – conjured up by a supercomputer in a post-apocalyptic world.”
- 3.“Thanks to this music, I now have a 2-year-old son.”
The story
A dead crush is the famous dead person you'd date if you could. alt-J turned it into a parlour game, and the game turned into a song: Joe Newman's verse goes to Lee Miller, the photographer, and Gus Unger-Hamilton's goes to Anne Boleyn, a former Queen of England who did not get a happy ending. Morbid? Sure. Also pretty funny.
The band skipped the usual shots of themselves playing. Director Young Replicant (Alex Takacs, who also made their 3WW video) wrote a short sci-fi film around choreography by Darcy Wallace. In a post-apocalyptic future, an aging supercomputer keeps human memory alive by running simulations of the dead. Its avatars – wax-faced, androgynous women – take on the mannerisms of Sylvia Plath (drummer Thom Green's pick), Lee Miller and Anne Boleyn, and dance under flickering lights in a bunker while spinning glass discs flash glimpses of the strange reality they live in. Wallace researched each woman first – Miller's photographs, Tudor styling, Boleyn's beheading – and built the moves from there. The bunker is a water treatment plant in Essex.
Gus said the goal was short films that stick in your head and maybe shock you a little. A bored computer making dead poets dance in a sewage plant will do it. Deadcrush was the fourth single from Relaxer, the band's third album and a 2017 Mercury Prize nominee.
