Alternative chart-topping and 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards “Best New Artist (Alt & Rock)” nominee Bad Omens and Grammy-nominated artist and multi-hyphenate Poppy have spun a gripping story straight out of your sci-fi horror nightmares on their collaborative new single “V.A.N”. Following an exclusive audio premiere earlier today on SiriusXM’s Octane, the ferocious single and cinematic music video officially released this afternoon via Sumerian Records.
Written and produced by Bad Omens frontman Noah Sebastian, the song is the first glimpse of what the band will be offering on their upcoming album, the “Concrete Forever” project also known as “Concrete Jungle OST”. The project is an experimental extension of Bad Omens‘ hit LP “The Death Of Peace Of Mind” and the soundtrack to their “Concrete Jungle” comic book universe.
“V.A.N” is an industrial metal masterpiece about an artificial intelligence entity set out on a course to destroy humanity. The track immediately captivates the listener with Bad Omens‘ hypnotic production and Poppy‘s angelic, whispering vocals as she takes on the role of the Concrete Jungle Universe AI character V.A.N. It then shock-transitions into a powerful onslaught of frantic drums, heavy guitars, and Poppy‘s vocals evolving from otherworldly tones to aggro screams.
When asked about his approach to creating the single, Noah explained: “That’s a song that started just with the hook ‘Violence against nature’, and then after saving the project with the acronym and seeing it we realized it could be fun to think of ‘VAN‘ as a name. Thus the rabbit hole of ideas began that led us to decide to write lyrics from the perspective of an artificial intelligence gone rogue.”
Playing off the AI concept of the track and taking additional visual inspiration from the video game “Portal”, the film “Ex Machina” and “Stranger Things”, the story is brought to life by a visually stunning sci-fi thriller. In the mini-film written by Sebastian, Poppy, and Garrett Nicholson, Poppy portrays a synthetic human being held captive and subjected to experiments in a laboratory, eventually escaping and embarking on a murderous rampage. Watch the Garrett Nicholson– and Poppy-directed video below.
