attachment-Liars From What the Never Was

Liars pay homage to '2001,' 'Alien' & more in "From What the Never Was" video

Liars have shared the third and final pre-release single from their new album The Apple Drop that’s out next week via Mute. “From What the Never Was” is methodical and moody, with a careful, descending chord progression and ratatat drum pattern over which Angus Andrew spits out some whispery dread.

The videos for this album have been pretty memorable, and “From What the Never Was” is no different, paying homage to a sci-fi classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien and more. It’s also the final segment to the video trilogy that began with “Sekwar” and continued with “Big Appetite.” It is, like the other two videos, intense. Says Angus, “‘From What the Never Was’ is intended as a moment of recollection within the journey of The Apple Drop; a point that our traveller has reached which is far from the starting place, but also right back there in memory. The drum sound was appropriated from an old song called ‘We Fenced Other Gardens with the Bones of Our Own.’ In that track, the protagonist is drunk on delusions of grandeur, relishing the power of destruction. Now far removed, that character is weary, remorseful.

Angus goes on to say, “In preparation for the video, I went back to the ‘Sekwar’ cave to map it three-dimensionally. Instructed by a digital artist in NYC (Dan Moore), I strapped a 360-degree camera to my head and paced the lengths of the cave’s interior. The resulting data was transformed into a wireframe model and featured as a hologram in ‘FWTNW.’ The cave’s positioning right beneath another location manifests the premise of the song. You’re in the ‘same spot’ but understanding it from a completely new perspective. My experience in revisiting that space alone was both psychologically informative and disturbing. The slow, methodical steps required to document the dark depths of the cave’s interior invited the company of bats and of fear.”

Director Clemens Habicht, who’s been behind the camera on all three videos, adds, “Angus and his crew are subjected to the traumas and melodramas of classic sci-fi tropes, brutalised by the sadism of scenes from films I think I was probably way too young to have seen as a kid. Only Liars would entertain and embrace my trepanning fantasies. Like any mission, this was only possible by the absolute commitment of everyone involved. Special thanks to DOP Tyson Perkins for signing up for another adventure, and to Beau and her team for their absolute generosity and excitement.”

You might want to look up “trepanning,” if you’re unfamiliar, before watching this video which you can check out, if you dare, below.

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