Of Montreal Debut Flamboyant New Video, “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia”

Of Montreal have released a new video for “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia,” taken from their new album, White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood, out on March 9 via Polyvinyl.

White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood will be the band’s 15th studio album, and their first since 2016’s Innocence Reaches.

In a series of tweets, of Montreal wrote that their new song is “about panic, fear, insecurity, misanthropy, self-loathing, vanity, lustfulness, arrogance and um … loving compassion. It is an anthem for the post-Obama era, an age where spurious hope has been replaced with a hatewave of pharmaceutically diminished internet neo-realism.”

The ‘80s-inspired video for the band’s new electro-pop song features a flamboyant, cross-dressing Kevin Barnes, the band’s longtime frontman, as he struts around and experiments with different brightly colored wigs.

Barnes recently discussed the musical approach behind the band’s new album:

Musically, I was very inspired by the extended dance mixes that people used to make for pop singles back in the ‘80s. It’s so cool how a lot of the 80’s hits had these really intricate and interesting longer versions that wouldn’t get played on the radio and could only be heard in the clubs. I used that template with these tracks, I wanted them all to feel like the extended “club edit” of album tracks. I also decided to abandon the “live band in a room” approach that I had been using on the recent albums and work more on my own or remotely with collaborators.

Barnes also commented on the album’s strange title, White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood:

The two title concept came to me when I was thinking about how difficult it is to frame the message of a song with just one title, because so often the songs are about so many different subjects. ‘White Is Relic’ was inspired by James Baldwin’s writings regarding the creation and propagation of a toxic American White identity. I’ve come to learn how it’s just a tool wielded by the 1% to give poor white people a false sense of superiority in an effort to keep the masses placated and numb to how deeply we’re all getting fucked by our capitalist rulers. An ‘Irrealis Mood’ is a linguistic indicator that something isn’t yet reality but does have the potential to become so.

Watch the video for “Paranoiac Intervals/Body Dysmorphia” below, listen to Of Montreal’s 2012 Daytrotter Session further down and preorder White Is Relic/Irrealis Mood here.