Scottish synth pop band Chvrches released its video for “Bury It” today, a sweet sunset-toned fantasy of telekinesis and flight. Created by the band’s artistic collaborator, Jamie McKelvie, and animated by Mighty Nice, the video is set to a remix featuring Paramore’s Hayley Williams.
The premise of the animation is straightforward enough. Band members Lauren Mayberry, Iain Cook, and Martin Doherty have piled a variety of extraneous objects on the roof so that they can use them to practice telekinesis. And so, à la Alex Mack, they commence lifting stovetop espresso makers and compact discs and roller skates, begetting a spiral of worldly detritus.
Enter Hayley Williams. She, too, has mastered this skill, and after the four flex their mind muscles in tandem, she models the next step in their levitation exercises. (The video takes the lyrics “rise above” quite literally.) Shooting herself into the sky, Williams suspends above the others, ensconced in a liquid yellow diamond. Mayberry immediately follows suit, and so do Cook and Doherty, albeit with some complication.
But soon, all four have summoned the power to self-levitate and abandon the earth. They hover over plump pink clouds, contemplating the view of what they’ve forsaken.
Listening to one song on Every Open Eye means, for me, bathing in the entire album. The tracks are knotted together in an assemblage that demands completion, more so than many albums. With perhaps the exception of “Never Ending Circles,” hearing a spare song or two leaves me with the nagging sensation that I’ve neglected a larger, structured narrative. But a good music video—and “Bury It” is very good—can cure me of this mild mania. For the first time, I can focus squarely on the gospel-esque chorus, the insistent retread of the synth. “Bury It” is church meets nylon meets turntable, which is to say it is something else instead.
Video and Screengrab via YouTube.