Watch Cage the Elephant’s Hallucinatory ‘Cold Cold Cold’ Video
Cage the Elephant tap into the paranoia of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange with their hallucinatory “Cold Cold Cold” video. Lead singer Matt Shultz directed the clip, which follows a straitjacketed young man through a horrific journey filled with drug injections, creepy masks, dancing nurses, sword swallowing, flexing pectoral muscles and decapitation.
“I think we’re all very prone to subscribe to a safe, surface level pursuit of happiness, keeping our adversities out of sight out of mind, in a way,” Shultz said of the video’s themes in a statement. “We try to fix ourselves to fit into the social norm, and it is so easy to forget that in one way or another, the broken hearted are the beautiful ones.”
The surging surf-rock single highlights Cage the Elephant‘s fourth LP, 2015’s Tell Me I’m Pretty. The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach produced the album, encouraging the Kentucky quartet to expand sonically and embrace raw first-takes.
“We had a chip on our shoulder after the first record,” guitarist Brad Shultz told Rolling Stone. “We felt we had to prove people wrong that we weren’t just a commercial rock band, to the point where I used to tell people, ‘I hate that record – don’t listen to it!’ It took away from enjoying writing music. Sometimes you have to take an immense amount of stress to bring things to a head. This record brought us back to being those kids in Bowling Green.”
Cage the Elephant have tour dates scheduled throughout early 2017. A full itinerary is available at their website.