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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Death Cab for Cutie makes triumphant return with exquisite lyric video

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Death Cab for Cutie's "Black Sun" lyric video takes marketing to a new level with fan-artist collaboration.

Death Cab for Cutie’s hiatus from music is officially over. The band is back with a movement and a gesture that is so characteristically sweeping and grandiose, it feels as though they were never really gone.

To promote its new album “Kintsugi," out in March, the band created a lyric video for its new single “Black Sun.”

In order to create this video, however, lead singer Ben Gibbard wrote out the lyrics to the entire song on a giant piece of canvas and then cut that canvas into 33 pieces.The band then held a contest on Instagram, and gave each of the winners a piece of the canvas. Coming together, fans were able to uncover the entire song, and to create a piece of collaborative artwork between artist and audience.

The lyric video is not a typical words-on-screen montage. It's a gorgeous piece of video art that takes viewers through geometrically-balanced mountain ranges set in a neutral sepia-toned color scheme. At the center is the song’s symbol: a black sun. The song sounds like classic Death Cab; It's eerily similar in tonality and lyrics to tracks like “Grapevine Fires” and “Talking Bird” from 2008’s "Narrow Stairs" and “Different Names for the Same Thing” off of 2005’s “Plans.” Fans who were disappointed with the band’s 2011 album “Codes and Keys” will be overjoyed with this return to classic poetic beauty that established Death Cab as an indie darling in the 2000s.

In an era when music videos for huge pop artists are becoming more and more like walking advertisements for the medley of brands that endorse them -- see J.Lo’s “Dance Again Ft. Pitbull” (2012) – Death Cab is sticking to what it does best: producing beautiful music, art and a transcendent cinematic experience for listeners.