John Carpenter has shared a new single and visualiser for “The Dead Walk,” a track from his first album of non-soundtrack music in nearly five years, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death (set for release February 5 from Sacred Bones).
The song’s pulsing synths and skittering hi-hats calls to mind a zombie apocalypse situated in a discotheque, a mental image reinforced by the accompanying visualiser in which artwork by Boneface is given creepy life by Liam Brazier’s animation. The clip also hints toward a more detailed visual collaboration to come.
Underpinning Carpenter’s musical renaissance has been his ongoing and evolving collaboration with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. They’ve composed and performed as a trio since the first Lost Themes album in 2015: on studio albums, on soundtracks, and onstage.
On Lost Themes III, the trio reaches a new level of creative mind meld as richly rendered worlds are built in the interplay between Davies’s guitar and the duelling synthesisers played by the Carpenters. But whereas the original Lost Themes album came as a pleasant surprise after years of relative silence from Carpenter, the third instalment sees him in the midst of a resurgent moment as a cultural force. The trio’s 2018 Halloween score gave his music its biggest audience in decades, and the world he releases his new album into is one that has, at long last, given him the credit he deserves as a founding father of modern electronic music.
LOST THEMES III: ALIVE AFTER DEATH TRACK LIST
1. Alive After Death
2. Weeping Ghost
3. Dripping Blood
4. Dead Eyes
5. Vampire’s Touch
6. Cemetery
7. Skeleton
8. Turning the Bones
9. The Dead Walk
10. Carpathian Darkness
