Dan Bejar’s Destroyer released the great album Have We Met earlier this year, and they were on tour when the pandemic hit. (Our own Ryan Leas witnessed them covering Lou Reed in Brooklyn, and he wrote that “if you are a Destroyer fan, you should really make an effort to see these shows.” This was about two days before everything got shut down.) While Bejar and company were on tour, the directors David Galloway and David Ehrenreich were with them, shooting footage for a possible film. Today, they’ve shaped some of that footage into a haunting video for the Have We Met highlight “foolssong.”

In the “foolssong” clip, we see footage of Destroyer performing actual shows in front of actual people, and we also see images of a world thrown into sudden crisis: Alarmist news reports, abandoned landscapes, national monuments with handwritten shutdown signs on their doors. It’s a powerful set of sad, stark images. Put this one alongside Run The Jewels’ “Ooh LA LA” in the hall of fame for music videos shot before the pandemic and released during it. Below, watch the “foolssong” video and check out a statement from the directors.

Galloway and Ehrenreich write:

Snow Day. At this very peculiar time, the expression “Have We Met” deserves a question mark less than ever. We likely haven’t met anyone new since March, and the cadence of this statement is more of an absolute than an actual inquiry.

The tour got cancelled. We were making a film. Maybe we still are, it’s hard to tell, though. “foolssong” is what’s left of that for now.

“foolssong” is a lullaby, it’s the painted book cover of a sinister romantic novel, and it’s our second favourite song on the album.

Packing up mid-stride and pushing through North America to find solace in quarantine is a pretty foreign experience.

With any luck, these alien landscapes provide only a temporary snapshot of an unfamiliar world, a glimpse into a future that denotes self-separation, isolation, but on the bright side, maybe a little bit more wonder.

Hopefully this is a picture that does not dry.

Have We Met is out now on Merge. Check out our Dan Bejar interview here.