In February, Amen Dunes announced Death Jokes, the follow-up to 2018’s Freedom. Damon McMahon shared “Purple Land,” and then “Boys” last month. Today, the eclectic New York artist is back with “Round The World” with a music video directed by Steven Brahms.

“Round The World” began with a voice memo McMahon made in winter 2019. The vocals were based around nine minutes of a complicated piano arrangement which took weeks to notate. He tried to hire two pianists to record it, but it didn’t work out. The song also contains samples of a collection of Chilean protest recordings from the coup in 1973, a mash-up of Coil with Bill Monroe, Fairlight CMI string and horn, a slowed-down UK garage track, and more.

On an afternoon in July 2022 during a thunderstorm in Woodstock, the final two minutes of “Round the World” were written at the same time as the track “Poor Cops,” and these moments on the album have the most important samples on the album. Read what McMahon said about it:

Everybody wants everything to come so easily.
Everybody wants to be comfortable, but they’re so uncomfortable.
We have so much of everything that it means nothing.
We take so much that we get nothing at all.
Some of us find a way to have our voices heard, but most of us are just being used.
You think they’re hearing you, but they’re not.
You say be yourself, but you won’t break the rules.
Poor cops, don’t let them tell you what to do.
You would punch a lot harder if you stopped being so cynical.
Fuck when you fuck, punch when you punch, love when you say you love.
We talk about wanting inclusion, but we shout about it while we hide in our cells.
We talk about being manipulated, but we do so using their methods and means.
They want us to feel like we are heard, so they encourage us to attack each other.
They tell us self-obsession is self-expression.
You say no one cares about you, but you don’t care about them.
My songs are all death jokes, and will long outlive me.
They remind me not to take myself too seriously.
I barely wrote them anyway. So who am I kidding?
And when I break the rules and speak honestly to you because I love you, that joke might get me
killed too.
There is more that’s tragic than what you think is tragic.
Wake up, live in love.
You say life is hard, but it’s a joke.
The world is not about to end, in fact it’s just beginning.

Watch the “Round The World” video below.

Death Jokes is out 5/10 on Sub Pop.