Pixies Release Vivid Animated Video for “Tenement Song,” Third Single Off Forthcoming Album

Spectators cheer as an apartment building is blown to pieces in “Tenement Song,” a music video Pixies just released for the third single off their forthcoming album Head Carrier. The video—conceived by Neirin Best, Lianne Pierce and Xavier Burrow of Krank! Collective—is an animated kaleidoscope of gruesome images capturing the imagined world inside a tenement dwelling.

Also featured are rats, dinosaurs, a wall of fish tanks, and vomit. In fact, the video’s surrealism is more akin to old Pixies lyrics than those of the less ambiguous “Tenement Song.” This isn’t the band’s old sound reincarnated (nor should it be), but it’s still very clearly Pixies, with the same jubilant darkness and harsh whimsicality the group has always had.

Head Carrier is due out on Sept. 30. It will be the first Pixies album since the addition of Paz Lenchantin, the group’s new full-time bassist, and the second full-length release since the band reunited in 2004.

Watch the “Tenement Song” video above, preferably not while eating your lunch.