Danny Elfman reworks Oingo Boingo's "Insects" for new solo album (watch the video)

Danny Elfman‘s first solo album in nearly four decades, Big Mess, is out on June 11, and among the new songs is a reworked version of Oingo Boingo’s “Insects” (from their 1982 album Nothing to Fear). This new version has a new techno-metal exoskeleton but the guts remain the same.

“In the beginning of 2020 I was preparing a live show for Coachella. I’d been looking for old Boingo songs that connected to the dystopian nightmare I found myself immersed in at that moment in time living in America,” Elfman says. “As I played around with different songs it occurred to me that ‘Insects’ made sense. Who were the ‘Insects,’ the blood suckers of today? It was obvious to me – they all hived together in Washington and seemed to thrive on sucking the rational sense of reality out of our brains.”

The video for this new version of “Insects” is a hyper-vivid video videogame world of techno-insects that’s part DOOM and part Starship Troopers. Directed by Sam and Andy Rolfes, the “Insects” video was created by puppeting over 80 creepy creatures in VR. “Every microsecond of waking life, a relentless digital swarm of information and virtual noise slowly consumes our minds, rendering us like insects being driven by manic buzzing stimuli,” says Sam Rolfes. “That said, more legs means better dancing. The video for ‘Insects’ starts off very ordinarily, following Danny Elfman as he gets ready for the day, meets some friends for lunch, but then is slowly consumed by a ravenous swarm of online static.” It’s a very cool, if extremely intense video (it comes with a seizure warning, too), and you can watch it below.

Danny will be performing as part of a Nightmare Before Christmas concert/film event at L.A.’s Banc of California Stadium for Halloween.