“Crimson Tide” is cinematic storytelling from Destroyer

The Canadian one-man band and part-time New Pornographer is back with a new art-house movie in a song

Almost twenty-five years on, Dan Bejar’s Destroyer project is still turning out idiosyncratic tracks featuring his instantly recognisable, Bowie-inspired vocals. When he is not playing his role as power-pop supremo in Candian supergroup The New Pornographers, Bejar has reliably given us music that looks to the past but sounds uniquely timeless.

The first track from his forthcoming album is a six-minute piece of cinematic storytelling, with synth-rock soundtracking surreal David Lynchian scenes. Inhabited by fleeting eclectic characters doing weird things, it invites you to “watch the blonde make mincemeat of the brunette”, and to listen to a child who is “not a child, he is twenty-five” as he “coos sweet nothings into a box of fuzz”. Then ” lightning strikes twice” and “the funeral goes completely insane”. And that is only a tiny part of it.

You can get lost in Destroyer’s narrative, trying to make heads or tails of it, or just cruise with the sweeping epic score. But this is one movie that will stay with you, even if you never quite get it.