Watch OK Go’s New “The Writing’s On The Wall” Music Video

Last month, OK Go released “The Writing’s On The Wall” as the first single from their upcoming album, Hungry Ghosts. Now you can see a music video for the pre-breakup anthem. The one-shot video took 50 takes to finally get right, and the final product looks great:

OK Go, ever known for their innovative and unique music videos, returned to a giant warehouse to film “The Writing’s On The Wall.” But this is not the Rube Goldberg machine from 2010’s “This Too Shall Pass.” Instead, this new video plays more on optical illusions that challenge your perception. “The Writing’s On The Wall” is filled with tricks on the eye, giving a visual for what the song’s lyrics describe. It’s the moment before the breakup, when the couple doesn’t see eye to eye, but they both know what the outcome will be.

Frontman and co-director Damian Kulash described the meaning of the new song and music video to Rolling Stone:

It was important to me that we didn’t add a layer of meaning that’s not already there. We wanted to be able to have messages in there, but I didn’t want them going throughout the entire song in way that would make you feel like you were reading the whole time.

Getting people to not overlook or discount the music can be a challenge. When the treadmill video broke we suddenly were a much bigger band than we were the month before, but we also knew that now people were gonna see us as a kind of a one-hit stunt band. We could go in two directions: We could either try to out-cool it – try to out-run it like Radiohead did with ‘Creep’ – or just embrace it and go, OK, what really worked here.

OK Go released an astonishing nine videos for eight songs from their last album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky. If they keep up with that trend, we can expect to see quite a few more videos over the next year or so. Their new album, Hungry Ghosts, will be out October 17th. You can pre-order it from their PledgeMusic site now.

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