Watch Mark Lanegan & Joe Cardamone's "Traction / Manifesto" horror short

Mark Lanegan and The Icarus Line‘s Joe Cardamone released their collaborative album Dark Mark Vs Skeleton Joe last year, and now they’ve taken two of its highlights — the brooding “Traction” and industrial banger “Manifesto” — and made a 10-minute short using them both, which Joe calls a “surreal horror trip into the abyss.” Here’s Joe, who directed it, with more on the songs, the short, and the backstory:

“Mark and I recorded ‘Traction’ during the beginning stages of the pandemic,” Joe tells us. “You’d turn on the TV and all you saw were bodies being piled up in New York City. Little did either of us know that the pandemic was soon going to hit much closer to home.”

“Soon after the completion on Mark’s vocal tracks he decided to shelter in Ireland,” Joe continues. “He packed his life up and crossed the ocean to a remote part of the country. As bad luck would have it, the virus got its hands around Mark’s neck and took him for some fucked up kind of ride, landing him in the ICU hooked up to machines. Through true grit he’s here to tell the story of that harrowing experience. A long surreal dream / nightmare through the ventilator. The new novel he released, Devil in a Coma, gets into details.”

“After Mark had recovered from the critical moments of his covid war I decided to visit. I hopped on a jet with my brother so that the three of us could spend some time together and make some films to support the album which was well on it’s way. ‘Traction’ seemed to fit the bill as a single, so we all decided we would get some footage while in Killarney. The first half of the video was filmed in the dark cold night in a couple hours. Everything was freezing. The themes of this video are loosely connected to the night Mark was taken from his home to the hospital. The ride away from home slowly devolves into ‘Skeleton Joe Manifesto’: a full brain rattle fever dream from beyond this place. Dark Mark and Skeleton Joe go on a surreal horror trip into the abyss. If you have epilepsy look away.”

The “Traction / Manifesto” video premieres in this post, and you can watch it below.