Last year, Killer Be Killed made significant waves with their new album Reluctant Hero. The record proved that what started as a star-studded supergroup — featuring Max Cavalera of Soulfly, Troy Sanders of Mastodon, Greg Puciato of Dillinger Escape Plan, and Ben Koller of Converge — was now one of the more exciting heavy bands out there. Now, Killer Be Killed have dropped a music video for the track “Animus” off of that album, and damn if it isn’t the most frantic, sinister thing you’ll see today.
Killer Be Killed make a smart decision in the “Animus” video by including performance footage, but not having it play out in real time. Instead, the one-minute-and-change video is a flickering stream of consciousness filled with quick cuts of the band, stock footage of battlefields, and the occasional piece of deeply unnerving imagery — the full moon rising over trees, a burning room with an exploding skeleton, all that good stuff. For a video this short and this simple in premise, it’s incredibly effective.
Check out “Animus” below:
Killer Be Killed’s Reluctant Hero is out now on Nuclear Blast. The project is one that, according to Sanders, isn’t going anywhere, even if they can’t just put out an album every year given their day jobs.
“In 2015, we did our short, one-and-only tour across Australia,” explained Sanders when he spoked to The Pit. “We left on a really high note, and the four of us vowed to continue. We knew it was going to take a long time. I believe we got together physically all in the same room once in 2016, once in 2017, once in 2018. We recorded all the music for the album in 2019, and we went back in for eight or nine days in early 2020 to write lyrics and record vocals. That is pretty damn accurate to the reality of our timelines. There was never a question of will there be another Killer Be Killed record, it was just when.”
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Words by Chris Krovatin
