Earlier this year, Brooklyn punk band Shop Talk released The Offering EP, which included the raucous title track and four other agents of chaos. Fast-forward a few months, and the trio has unveiled a new music video for “Black Friar.” The track is an absolute riot, as the band take inspiration from Francine Prose’s book The Lives Of The Muses, zeroing in on a gothic chapter about 1800s supermodel Elizabeth Siddal.
Vocalist and guitarist Jon Garcia notes about the track: “Elizabeth Siddal served as a muse to a number of Pre-Raphaelite artists, marrying one of them. Her husband, Dante Rossetti, saw her as a kind of reincarnation of Dante Alighieri’s muse, Beatrice, and projected this fantasy onto the flesh-and-blood woman he’d married. Siddal’s corpse was exhumed some 7 years after her death, and it’s said that her remains were beautiful and untouched by rot… In a nutshell, this song is about the desire to connect with the dead through works of art (if not through literal exhumation!), and the curious relationship between an artist and their muse.”
Watch the William Hart-directed music video for “Black Friar” below. You can buy tickets to Shop Talk’s upcoming headlining show at TV EYE in New York City on August 18 here.