Watch Emily Haines’ Haunting ‘Legend of the Wild Horse’ Video
Metric singer Emily Haines unveiled a haunting new video for “Legend of the Wild Horse,” a song off Choir of the Mind, her first solo album with the Soft Skeleton in over a decade.
Continuing the story previously outlined in Haines’ videos for “Planets,” “Statuette,” and “Fatal Gift,” the singer stars as both a mother living a mundane suburban life and the red hooded doppelgänger who stalks her. After Haines passes out watching golf on TV, her double enters the room, knife in hand, and ultimately replaces the singer in the household, with the mother character now locked out of her own home.
“Society at large, humanity at large, is still drawn downward to our worst instincts in so many places,” Haines told W Magazine of the video. “Our worst instincts are, unfortunately, situated right next to our best instincts, and the things that make us genuine and authentic are situated next to our vices of greed and violence and narrow-mindedness and bias.”
Justin Broadbent, who helmed Choir of the Mind‘s previous visuals, also directed “Legend of the Wild Horse.”
Choir of the Mind follows 2006’s Knives Don’t Have Your Back. In June, Haines spoke to Rolling Stone about her new album and her body of work with Metric and beyond.
“There’s something so appealing to me about the idea that I dedicated my life to being a sound, which is a super strange mandate to set out, but I’ve done it and I am a sound,” Haines said.
“And to be able to on this record really explore through all the voicings – instead of doing orchestration as I’ve done in the past, I just did choral arrangements and I found that by layering all that stuff and allowing words to be said in different ways with different emotions and different character there was like – I just got the closest I feel I ever have to the essence of what I am as a sound. Not like a chick in a band or playing a synth or wearing whatever I’m wearing; just a human being who is somehow still going strong in a very unlikely field.”