It’s Horrors Week here at The A.V. Club, so it seems fitting that one of the more unsettling and NSFW music videos we’ve premiered is making its debut today. Mark Stoermer, bassist for The Killers, recently released his second solo album, Dark Arts, a record full of ’60s-era psych-rock throwbacks and retro harmonies and production. Nestled in the back half of the album is “Blood And Guts,” a trippy and kaleidoscopic tune that rides the line between Sgt. Pepper and The Kinks, but with a dark and off-kilter bent. And now, it has a video, directed by Charlotte Kemp Muhl, that pairs the music with appropriately hallucinatory and morbid imagery.
“‘Blood and Guts’ is a mini-psychedelic rock opera based on the Rembrandt painting entitled The Anatomy Lesson,” Stoermer tells The A.V. Club. “The video is a theatrical journey that juxtaposes sex and death, the material and the spiritual, the sacred and the profane, the grotesque and the beautiful, and the sombre and the silly. It is a celebration of life in the face of our mortality, while paying tribute to the forces of creation, preservation, destruction, and resurrection.”