Promiseland’s newest single and video, “Only Broken,” is a chaotic and evocative trip of deathbed visions, reflecting the self-destructing nightlife world. It was released today, May 22, via House of Feeling Records and mixed and mastered by Darkside’s Dave Harrington.
Off the bat, stickered with a “content warning,” the video’s got all the goods you could’ve found at the extinct new wave haven CBGB: “suicidal ideation, nudity, the presence of weapons, and strobe lighting.” The next two shots, as Promiseland (aka Johann Rashid) sings “I watched a thousand memories fade away,” show him loading a Russian roulette and then cut to a wet, hot, topless woman.
Rolling diagonally atop a montage of Rashid pointing the gun up his chin and semi-nude dancing-in-the-rain girls is the credits for the track, including the names of his Mexico City and NYC crew and cast, the Promiseland live band masthead, and the song’s production team. The visual embellishment, articulately placed during the film instead of at the close, only furthers Rashid’s end-of-life questioning and understanding of our inevitable doom.
The kinetic new wave track’s chorus, “I’m not dead, I’m only broken,” is the realization that while being engulfed by such deadly sins may feel like demise, perhaps we should keep dancing while we can.
“‘Only Broken’ is a raw reflection on the nightlife world that shaped Promiseland, where the line between survival and self-destruction blurs,” Rashid shares. “I wanted the intensity of the lyrics to be reflected in the video, weaving together Russian roulette, chaotic club floors, and flashes of life’s highs and lows into a chaotic spiral of sex, death, and the desperate urge to keep dancing even as we — and the world — bleed out. The video unravels like the final frames of a film, pulling backward through memories and chaos, collapsing into a kind of Big Bang. A recurring symbol of both violent creation and inevitable decay.“
There’s a sprinkling of existentialist quotes in the credits too: the first about abolishing war out of Susan Sontag’s On The Pain of Others. One by a life-meaning-questioning songwriter Elliot Smith. Roland Barthes’ profound proclamation: “No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.” Soviet screenwriter Andrei Tarkovsky’s timeless sentiment, “Modern mass culture … is crippling people’s souls.” Georges Bataille’s excerpt from Story of The Eye: “as if all the symbols came together in that one gleaming, insane instant,” which is much like Promiseland’s video – an insane montage of nightlife’s notorious pleasures and lusts that we can’t help but indulge in knowing they’ll break us in the gleaming face of death.
Rashid’s gearing up to release a slew of new singles throughout the year. And he’s playing next in Los Angeles this Saturday, May 24, at The Echo with Kills Birds and Wayne Miller. Stay tuned for his upcoming releases, and check out the new video here.