© 2025 Boise State Public Radio
NPR in Idaho
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
Boise State Public Radio Music can be heard in Boise and the surrounding Treasure Valley at 90.3FM, in the Payette Lakes region and Stanley basin, providing outstanding music, arts and cultural programming on air and online.

Dan Deacon Announces New Album With A Music Video Full Of Creepy Crawlies

We live! We die! We live again! There's something remarkably pointed about the War Boys' rallying cry from Mad Max: Fury Road. Their goal was Valhalla, sat at the table of a megalomaniac hopped up on guzzoline, but nevertheless their bodies would continue to serve the land as tasty snacks for all the worms and critters.

Gifted experimentalist Dan Deacon won't be speeding across apocalyptic deserts anytime soon, but he is thinking about our earthly passage of time. Surrounded by discarded cheese curls and cupcakes — not to mention several creepy crawlies — actor and comedian Aparna Nancherla stars as a decomposing corpse in the video for "Sat by a Tree," the first single off Deacon's forthcoming Mystic Familiar. After a couple of soundtrack scores and some assists for other artists, this is Deacon's first album all his own since 2015.

"A lot of my work focuses on death and it's pretty upbeat music, most of the time," Deacon explains.

As flesh-eating beetles and maggots swarm Nancherla's character rotting to bones, Deacon's whiz-bang bleeps and ecstatic melodics expand as the process of putrefaction comes full circle — the video ends "as a prequel to the life of a plant rather than the death of the person in the video," Deacon offers. We live! We die! We live again!


Mystic Familiar comes out Jan 31 on Domino Records (physical, digital).

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Tags
Listen to the Viking's Choice playlist, subscribe to the newsletter.

You make stories like this possible.

The biggest portion of Boise State Public Radio's funding comes from readers like you who value fact-based journalism and trustworthy information.

Your donation today helps make our local reporting free for our entire community.