Caleb Landry Jones recently announced that he’ll be releasing the follow up to last year’s debut album, The Mother Stone, this September. Titled Gadzooks, Vol. 1, it promises even more idiosyncratically psychedelic missives from the actor/musician, as evidenced by lead single “Bogie” and today’s new offering “The Loon”.
In fact, “The Loon” may well be the persona that lives deep inside CLJ’s musical mind, and he’s bringing him fully out into the light in this new song and video – exposing all the unsettling, nightmarish, and theatrical tendencies with sheer glee. Like many of his songs, “The Loon” sounds like The Beatles on a bad trip – but a bad trip is where CLJ shines. It begins with crawling synths, like a hallucinogen starting to kick in, your skin prickling as he sings in the opening line that “your world’s not like mine.” He spends the rest of the song gradually dragging us round to his warped perspective, seasick organs revolving all around. The descent into madness – or is it clarity? – is soundtracked by his dextrous voice, sliding from teasing howl to menacing whisper, until “The Loon” concludes with an explosion of drums and guitars – the sound of your worldview collapsing, never to be restored.
This is before we’ve even got to the video, where CLJ gets to show us his well-established ability to unsettle, but ramps it up quite a few notches in a hellish carnival of contortions. Director Jacqueline Castel introduces it by saying: “Part dream, part nightmare, The Loon is a psychedelic portrait of the multiple identities and inter-dimensional realities that exist inside oneself – a subconscious circus of the sublime and the grotesque.”
Watch the clip below or find “The Loon” on streaming platforms.
Caleb Landry Jones’ new album Gadzooks Vol. 1 comes out on September 24 through Sacred Bones (pre-order/save). You can find him on Instagram.
