Premiere: Heartour provokes and soothes with animated video, ‘Let the Robots Drive’
The synth-pop storyteller questions life with his first-ever animated music video.
We’ve all gotta lot of time to question existence and the meaning of life. Jason Young, known professionally as Heartour, feels such urgency more than most. “Let the Robots Drive” is a space-throbbing detour, even the universe’s edges appear to flow like fabrics flapping on a clothes line. The music video, premiering today on B-Sides & Badlands, sticks to the gums, chewy and bubbly, and its flavor tingles the tongue on its way to the extremities. Young gets the juices flowing, peppering in dashes of watermelon effervescence, in sonic form, of course, but it soaks into your senses in a way you’re not likely to expect. “After all this imagination, how are you surprised / And after all this imagination / Will you try to survive,” he proposes.
Such existential dread pings across fragmented synths as skipping stones, endlessly cascading outward from life as we know it. With director Steffen Heil in the driver’s seat, Young’s video melts between worlds, an animated feature with splashes of extraterrestrial notions and otherworldly vitality. “Plastic bags move like tumble weeds as we roll through town,” he sings, an acidic edge to his lips. “Things I don’t know and things I need / Turning upside down / I can tell you you’re unusual / Will you let the robots drive into the night.”
“Let the Robots Drive,” off his fifth album R U IN, out May 22, winds downward as a corkscrew, its sharp edges puncturing the brain and leaking out was is left of human thought. “I’ve never done an animated video before [this], and I’m really happy with how it turned out. Often when working on music, it can feel like you are creating a soundtrack to a movie in your mind,” writes Young over email. “‘Robots’ always felt like an animated dream to me and is one of a few songs on the new album that was really influenced by all of the time I’ve spent out in Joshua Tree pondering existence.”
“What will happen to humanity when artificial intelligence and evolution meet on a desert road in the middle of nowhere? I don’t know, but a general sense of anxiety about the future is a big theme running through my new album, which makes the last few months feel even stranger.”
Young takes you on an unexpectedly euphoric and cosmic sojourn, and his voice is the only constant between an ever-shifting model of “normal,” which doesn’t mean very much these days. But Heartour’s “Let the Robots Drive” both provokes and soothes in a time of great uncertainty.
Watch below:
Follow Heartour on his socials: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Website
