Last year, the great film-score composer and former Oingo Boingo leader was booked to play Coachella, but the pandemic cancelled those plans. So Elfman released “Happy,” a song he’d written for that Coachella set. It was his first solo music in 36 years. Elfman now has big plans for 2021. He intends to release a new single on the 11th day of every month. Elfman started that off a month ago, with his single “Sorry.” Today, he follows it up with a new one called “Love In The Time Of Covid.”

“Love In The Time Of Covid” is a snarly, string-streaked rocker that sounds more like Queens Of The Stone Age than anyone could’ve expected. There’s also a video, directed by the German filmmaker Sven Gutjahr in collaboration with Elfman’s creative director Sven Gutjahr. The video, filmed in Berlin, stars the Scottish transgender performer Shrek 666, and it uses heavy demon makeup to tell a story about isolation. Elfman himself makes a few cameos. Did you know that the 67-year-old Danny Elfman was jacked and tatted-up these days? I did not! Check it out below.

In a press release, Elfman says:

There’s certainly nothing light-hearted or funny about Covid, but I can still poke a little fun at the crazy way social isolation has changed our lives in every way shape and form, and that’s what “Love In The Time of Covid” is about. An expression of the borderline madness that so many of us have been experiencing. Lord knows I have. I wrote it from the view point of a young man going crazy in his apartment. Creators Gutjahr and Gilma had the idea to turn the lead character into a green skinned animal-like creature. As many us feel completely alienated in this insane new world we live in, and I thought it was an interesting idea.

“Love In The Time Of Covid” is out now on Epitaph.