Mac DeMarco Goes Through the Looking Glass in Unsettling “On the Square” Video
It's the final single from his new album Here Comes The Cowboy, out this week
Image via Mac's Record Label/YouTube
Mac DeMarco’s last single ahead of his new album Here Comes The Cowboy, out this Friday, May 10, on his own Mac’s Record Label, is “On the Square,” released Tuesday alongside an unsettling music video.
Taken with its visual (dir. William Sipos and Sean Campos), “On the Square” reads as a comment on performance as both deception and enlightenment—the ugly truths art and entertainment can obscure, or bring to the surface. “Baby are you satisfied? / Is this all that you had in mind? / On the square / living life that isn’t there,” DeMarco sings, searching for meaning in the artifice over subdued piano chords and keys. Meanwhile, his blank-masked protagonist takes the stage and steps into the spotlight, exchanging nods with Tommy Midnight’s white-gloved onlooker before submerging his face in a fountain. Through the looking glass, he sees various animal-human hybrids (wearing some impressive prosthetics), including a cat-man who appears to be “Cask of Amontillado”-ing himself. Outside, the one-man audience goes half-mad over DeMarco’s performance before applauding through a final fade to black.
“This video has been my most intimate experience with milk yet,” says co-director Sipos in a statement. “At one point I had Mac in a latex mask, shivering in a kiddie pool filled with cold milk. I did not feel like a nice person.” DeMarco can also blame Catherine Sweet, the mind behind the video’s singular concept, for his chilly milk bath.
“On the Square” is Here Comes The Cowboy’s third advance track, following lead single “Nobody” and April’s “All of Our Yesterdays.” DeMarco has described his follow-up to 2017’s This Old Dog as “my cowboy record,” though based on the videos he’s released during its rollout (including his turn as a cowboy hat-clad lizard man in his visual for its lead single), Here Comes The Cowboy strikes us more as his manimal record.
DeMarco, coming off a recent set on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, embarks on an extensive tour of North American and Europe in support of his new album, starting tonight in Sonoma, Calif.
Watch the “On the Square” video below, followed by DeMarco’s Tonight Show performance and his 2013 SXSW set from the Paste archives, and find the artist’s tour itinerary further down.