Earlier this year, Eels, Mark Oliver Everett’s long-running and permanently bummed orchestral pop project, came back with the elegant new album The Deconstruction. After making fun new videos for album tracks “Today Is The Day” and “Bone Dry,” they’ve got a new one for “Rusty Pipes.” This one follows what happens when a pile of discarded scrapyard metal comes to live, goes looking for its old home, and gets lost in the world, before finally finding employment and companionship. Here’s what director Matthias Hoene says about it:

When I first listened to the song, I really responded to the theme of being out of synch with your environment and the story almost wrote itself. The hard work was to structure the story to be perfectly in synch with the song, and get every storytelling beat right while shooting on our tight two-day schedule. I initially sketched the costume roughly on my iPad and then Yungah Lee, a super talented concept artist I’ve worked with, fleshed out my idea. Finally, we had a team of model makers in Prague make the costume from old bits of metal and pipes and ship it over to us in LA. I was doing the final VFX shot myself on a plane to LA and the person sitting next to me watched what I was doing and asked if I was a drainpipe salesman, which I consider as a job done sign of approval.

And here’s the video:

Meanwhile, Eels performed “Bone Dry” on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show on Sunday night. Colbert’s production team made the performance look like an old silent-movie clip. Here it is:

The Deconstruction is out now.