Mr. Bungle has a new music video: “Sudden Death”, a track from the band's latest album, The Raging Wrath of the Easter Bunny Demo , via Ipecac Recordings, their first new material in 21 years.
“If you lived in Lakewood, Colorado, during the early 1990s, there’s a small chance you saw and heard a 16-year-old boy slowly driving through town in a white 1974 Mustang II, windows down, rocking the neighborhood with Mr. Bungle’s music,” says the video’s director, Derek Cianfrance . “That 16-year-old boy was me, and that song I listened to repeatedly set the standard for my life as an artist. So, 30 years later, when I got a call from Mike Patton asking me to direct a music video for one of the songs from his new album, The Raging Wrath Of The Easter Bunny Demo , I questioned whether my life was really a dream… I told Mike I had never directed a music video before, but he wasn’t discouraged.”
“I listened to the album and asked if I could work on the song 'Sudden Death'. It reminded me of the feelings of anguish I carried during my youth while growing up in the shadow of an imminent and forbidding thermonuclear war,” he reveals. “I decided I could make a short film (well, not so short – the song is almost 8 minutes long!) about these fears that haunted me. I was also interested in meditating on the theme of desensitization in modern society, where citizens are gradually and systematically numbed to the possibility of cataclysmic consequences. As the song was written in the mid-80s, I determined that the video should look like it was made back then and envisioned it as a kind of rediscovered relic. Filming during a global pandemic proved to be a fitting backdrop for the unease in the song. This also presented a unique challenge, as I was too nervous to work with actors – so I had to think of another solution, making this video with a small team of trusted collaborators and working with my lifelong heroes was nothing short of a dream come true.”
Check out the music video for “Sudden Death”, and below that, the new Mr. Bungle album:
