Weirds release new music video for ‘Phantom’

May 8, 2017 James Weaver

Leeds based rockers WEIRDS have released a brand new music video!

The new music video, for the track Phantom, is taken from their upcoming debut album Swarmculture which is scheduled to be released later in May. Speaking about the new song and video, vocalist Aidan Razzall says, “this video stands in stark simplicity. We sought to achieve the exact opposite from our previous video for Valley of Vision, which was a more cinematic and dramatic story. Taking inspiration from the K Foundations Burn A Million Quid, we burned an effigy of our debut album cover in unadorned surroundings. As they burnt a million pounds in cash to spark debate on worth of currency, we visualised the Phantom video with an element of catharsis. Our record Swarmculture is a polished example of time, effort and passion, and to see its physical form brought down to ash and dust over the course of two and half minutes serves to deliver it into the world. You could draw references to iconoclasm, but it’s far more simple than that- the cuts between the wasteland backdrop and the cover being engulfed in flames echoes the structure of the track. As each chorus comes in, the burn becomes more severe until nothing but scraps are left. Phantom is probably the poppiest and most colourful track we’ve written, so it was a conscious decision to create a tension in the video between the psychedelic sonic world and the stark, brutal visual one.”

Watch the official music video for Phantom here:

The release of the new video comes on the back off the band’s Facebook page being bizarrely hacked into a viral videos page where WEIRDS lost all control over their social media. Speaking about the experience, Razzall explains, “this shows a darker side to the way we all use social media today. As soon as you make a Facebook account you sign away your power to a huge corporation, and when that relationship is compromised, it can be devastating for small, independent artists like us. Bands, businesses, artists, filmmakers, whatever, rely on social media as the main port of call for new fans. We live in a time where, particularly in music, your Facebook page is sadly an indicator of your success to people that haven’t heard of you before, which makes it an inescapable necessity. Even though the hack hadn’t affected our day to day lives- we were still playing shows and doing what we do, it felt like the reputation and following we had cultivated online, which is what everyone is so dependent on, had been lost. On a serious note, it was weird how depressing the situation actually was. It was like a really mundane episode of Black Mirror set in a van on the M1. Unfortunately, it felt to us like there could be one day in the world where everyone’s online existence was compromised, and everyone would re-evaluate how dependent we’ve become on social media platforms. It’s made us definitely reflect on how we use social media for the band.”