Com Truise (aka Seth Haley) already makes music that sounds like the score to some lost, sci-fi VHS curio, so turning one of his songs into a video about a murderous android feels a bit redundant. Nevertheless, the clip for “Propagation” (premiering exclusively here at The A.V. Club) is a very stylish redundancy. Writing-directing team Will Joines and Karrie Crouse have turned the track, one of the more melancholy from the recent Iteration, into a techno-dystopian vignette that could be a miniature episode of Black Mirror. In the gracefully directed clip, Haley’s emotive synth-burbles soundtrack the awakening of a docile, idealized wife-bot (Trieste Kelly Dunn) as she slowly becomes self-aware and takes her inevitable revenge. Science has been warning us for years about the dangers posed by robot wives, of both an ethical and a getting-crushed-by-their-strong-robot-hands nature. We can only pray this song is catchy enough that people finally start to listen.
Iteration is out now on Ghostly International.