Miyamoto Musashi and a swaggy, punk rock muse meet for a night of boilermakers and bad decisions in dystopian Detroit. Nine months later behold, Sturgill Simpson’s newest single and accompanying video, Sing Along.
The music video is a ronin-inspired retelling of Max Max. It features an unnamed samurai-like figure tearing through a dystopian metropolis and ravaging the establishment.
It is one of nine anime short-flicks by Director Jumpei Mizusaki and Designer Takashi Okazaki that will comprise a Netflix film to be released on Sept. 27 alongside Simpson’s newest record Sound and Fury.
The song’s opening is pure electronica, a groove that could be featured on a Nintendo kung-fu game and four-on- the-floor.
Seven seconds in, Simpson’s poetic lyrics and a cavalry of distorted guitars take point, charging full-speed into a place where the prettiest thing is “a single strand of spider’s weave/Just dancing in the sun.”
“I can’t go on living alone now that you’re gone/You done me wrong so here’s your song/Now sing along baby,” Simpson growls through the chorus.
This arrangement of words could be found in any done-me-wrong heartbreak song, but this isn’t one of those songs.
It is undoubtable that the narrator is heartbroken, but spite fuels his words. The swagger is not lost to the listener.
Simpson has promised creative experimentation since leaping into the musical vanguard with his 2013 traditional country release High Top Mountain.
If 2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music and 2016’s Grammy Award-winning A Sailor’s Guide to Earth were evidence that the musical iconoclast meant what he said, Sing Along is Simpson banging his gavel.
In an August press release, Simpson described the vision for his upcoming release.
“We went in without any preconceived notions and came out with a really sleazy, steamy rock ‘n’ roll record. It’s definitely my most psychedelic. And also, my heaviest. I had this idea that it’d be really cool to animate some of these songs, and we ended up with a futuristic, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, samurai film.”
Sing Along is greasy, grungy and far from the country music that helped Simpson gain notoriety.
On Sept. 27 fans will have the opportunity to see where the new single fits into his rock ‘n’ roll samurai concept via Netflix and anywhere music is streamed.