It’s honestly hard for doom to catch me off guard these days, but that’s exactly what CHROME GHOST did with their new single “The Furnace.” The haunting and melodic vocals that draw me into this song, only to ravage my synapses as soon as Eva Rose of CHRCH comes in. The bludgeoning comfort of the percussion, and the melancholy, melodic riffs. Every hair on me stands up; my body’s reacting to emotions on this record that my conscious mind isn’t even processing. And the visuals are simple but captivating and complement It’s pretty fucking dope that we get to premiere CHROME GHOST’s video for “The Furnace” today. It’s off their new album House of Falling Ash that’s out via Seeing Red Records on October 28th — pre-order it here or on their Bandcamp.
Lyrically, “The Furnace” covers a wide array of thought and feelings. We begin with a poetic description of the “Rose of the lonesome valley” who wears a horned halo. “Dewdrops and melancholy” wound the morning sunbeams as light comes over the horizon. This leads us through multiple stages; a cruel introspection where the narrator asks cutting questions of themselves, and with the introduction of CHRCH’s Eva Rose comes a description of a nightmarish vision where plague dogs encircle a burning house, and the shattering of one’s hollow self in order to “burn away, to let it all go”, ending with a final and guttural scream.
Jake Kilgore, Chrome Ghost
The music video was conceived and co-directed by myself with my longtime friend Ryan Pehrson. We knew that is would be unrealistic to film an action packed short film three times longer than a standard music video, so we opted to establish a mood.
Inspired partially by visual storytellers like Panos Cosmatos and our desire to have it look like the inside of a volcano, we knew that we could achieve most of the effect through lighting and other in camera effects. The biggest shift in tone comes with the arrival of guest vocalist Eva Rose, who signifies a change in filming technique. We utilized projection as backlighting with some fog and a honeycomb lens filter to instantly bring a new look that would flesh out the three color palettes of the video. We start with white, go to orange, and in the moments of highest intensity, the world becomes black.
This combined with a multitude of frame rates helped us build energy over the course of the run time.
