New album Black Heart out 20th January 2023
"Head Like A Hole", the second single off Miriam's forthcoming LP Black Heart, drops on Wednesday 16 November!
Head Like a Hole is a clever, powerful 90s throwback track depicting a love/hate relationship with technology and its blurred lines in our everyday interaction. Miriam's voice expresses a hushed urgency, a lilting and listing musical thread, leading to the track's crescendo with a choir, oscillating synth and a scorching guitar solo.
Head Like A Hole focuses on our co-dependency with the internet, its knobby fingers needling into all aspects of our lives: the good news, bad news, validation, cancelling, discrimination and faux-friending. Miriam says, "How can we hate this? The great library in the sky! But it's so good though! We are entranced yet anxious targets zooming around the internet and it's beautiful and connected, addictive and thrilling! I love it, can't look away. At the same time, it's a great vacuum of space that our cyber-dimensional lives are making in our minds, constantly claiming more real estate till we have no room left to recalibrate and regulate - only react."
Filmed by Winger Brothers, and edited by Miriam Clancy, the video for Head Like A Hole drew on inspiration from old Split Enz videos, Miriam's favourite - Donnie Darko, and David Lynch's Lady In The Radiator, with a little Logan's Run thrown in for good measure. It's a personal video, the footage real, the themes universal - the internet is taking over, to the extent where Miriam feels at one with the machine. The lightning was filmed from Miriam's tiny balcony, downtown. The skating scenes are a metaphor for the great unplug, filmed on the back streets of Kutztown, Pennsylvania where Keith Haring came from, where roads are wild with cracks and old tarseal. "We would have looked bonkers, but it was one of my fave ever video shoots - Skateboarding isn't work, it's alive and awesome. Ride or die! Unless I break my guitar hand, then I'm burning that thing."
Miriam grew up on sci-fi and horror shows. The song and video together fall somewhere in the middle, but she loved the set design and "futurist" couture of Logan's Run with its dark narrative, a death cult in which no-one lives past their third decade. Miriam wears Karen Walker and Logan's Run chic in the video for "Head Like A Hole".