Musicians have been pairing their creative work with some kind of visual component for decades, typically just with traditional music videos, but sometimes a piece of music warrants a more complex companion piece, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thom Yorke collaboration on Netflix. Even rarer still are companion videos that are anime, like Daft Punk’s awesome Insterstella 5555, and now—16 years after that—another artist has realized that anime is a cool way to promote an album. As reported by Billboard, Sturgill Simpson stopped by San Diego Comic-Con yesterday to announce a new album called Sound & Fury, with the album coming alongside an anime film of the same name from Takashi Okazaki and Junpei Mizusaki (both of whom worked on the direct-to-video DC movie Batman Ninja).
Simpson also shared a teaser for the Sound & Fury anime, and it happens to look a whole lot like Batman Ninja (which had an interesting combination of CG and traditional anime-style animation). Billboard says each song on Simpson’s album will “accompany a different segment of the movie,” and both will be available this fall. The movie portion will be available on Netflix, which is probably the best option for something like this, especially since people might not necessarily want to buy a physical album and a physical anime movie that accompanies the album in the year 2019. Speaking of the album, Simpson says it’s a “really sleazy, steamy rock ‘n’ roll record” that is his “most psychedelic.” He also notes that the movie is a “futuristic, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, samurai film.”