After wowing us with the Krautrock-indebted electronic pop nugget that was May’s “Dancing Light,” Grumbling Fur have returned with a video for “The Ballad of Roy Batty.” The English duo comprises noted friends-of-Sunn O))) Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan, who are prepping their second LP Glynnaestra for a July 23 release on Thrill Jockey. Roy Batty, on the other hand, was the leader of the super-evil Nexus-6 replicants in the 1982 dystopic masterpiece Blade Runner.
In fact, the song’s chorus is a line-for-line reading of actor Rutger Hauer’s dramatic final speech as Batty — the famous “Tears in rain soliloquy” — to Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard on the rooftop of the Bradbury Building in Los Angeles: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”
As for the video, it finds Grumbling Fur in a forest, looking enigmatic while contemplating far tinier mysteries than the sort Batty was concerned with.
