Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton – “Planets” Video

Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton – “Planets” Video

Last month, Metric’s Emily Haines announced that she was reviving her solo project Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton for a new album called Choir Of The Mind. We’ve already heard the excellent lead single “Fatal Gift,” and now she’s shared a music video for a new track entitled “Planets.” Directed by Justin Broadbent — who designed the album artwork and helmed all of the music videos for the LP, which make up one long-form story — the stark clip shows multiple Emily Hainses trudging dejectedly around an empty room, trailing a baseball bat behind them. The song itself is truly gorgeous, layering her voice into an angelic choir supported by melancholic piano, and you can watch and listen below.

In a newsletter to her fans, Haines also wrote a little bit about the album:

Faced with a battle of escalating obligations vs my privacy / any chance I might have of retaining my uniquely meaningful life, I retreated into writing my first solo album since Knives Don’t Have Your Back came out in 2006, a distant time before we were handcuffed to our phones.

I came back to Toronto, to the neighbourhood I helped build, to the friends I have only seen in fragments over the past decade, to my family. I stopped flying to NYC and Berlin and everywhere else. I narrowed the scope of my existence to the blocks that stretch between my little secret garden house, Giant studios, and the park. My life quite suddenly exploded in colour as I felt my fractured heart & body reconstruct themselves in one physical place. All the while I kept writing, and Choir of the Mind was born.

This album is my attempt to be free of the choir of voices that have been narrating the specifics of my worthlessness to me in my head for as long as I can remember. In putting this music out there, in talking to people, other women, I have discovered that this inner chorus of inadequacy is something we sadly share. Millionaire 1 % women, rock star women, restauranteurs, athletes, movie stars, tech sector women, moms, hot 22-year-old babes in the clubs, hippie grandmothers… If this sounds familiar to you, my hope is that listening to Choir of the Mind might drown out that racket, at least for an hour or so. And if you’re a guy, or a girl, or any gender in between, and you don’t understand what the hell I’m talking about… Good for you! Enjoy the music! Don’t worry about me. I’ll get there someday, too.

Choir Of The Mind is out 9/15 via Last Gang Records. Pre-order it here.

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