Come March 11, fans of discordant, dystopian post-punk will get a welcome dose of big hooks and brazen lyrics courtesy of new music by New York’s own Dead Tooth, a band that features longtime DIIV lead guitarist Andrew Bailey. With Bailey splaying counter melodies throughout their new EP, Pig Pile, frontman Zach James immortalizes his agile onstage presence; as he delivers his vocals, one can practically see him creeping and shaking like a long-lost relative of Nick Cave or Guy Picciotto.

In 2015, James began wearing the suit of the Silver Spaceman, a bedroom folk superhero persona that lifted him out of his Brooklyn bedroom and into the terrifying world of artful soul-bearing, and founded a new music project. His first at the helm — an early stint in Haybaby (on record label Tiny Engines) gave him the confidence — it started slowly but then quickly gained momentum. On smoke breaks during long dinner shifts, he got to know Bailey, who was modest about his main gig in shoegazers DIIV — so much so that James wasn’t aware of his new friend’s résumé until he saw him in front of a sold-out crowd at the Music Hall of Williamsburg.

When Bailey and James joined forces, the project began to take on a different shape. Their music snarled and simmered around darker textures, miles away from earlier folk-rock threads into murkier trenches. Inspired by his own identity rather than a fictional one, James looked to his darkened smile and rechristened the project “Dead Tooth.” Since the rebrand, the group has been relatively prolific, recording their debut EP in 2018 and later collaborating with Jamal VanSluytman, member of the pioneering afro-punk outfit No Surrender. Most of the band’s steam has billowed up during the pandemic, with singles releasing at a steady clip.

Today, the Big Takeover has the pleasure of exclusively introducing the video for Dead Tooth’s latest bite of the apple, “Blind,” which appears on the Pig Pile EP released through Trash Casual. James recently told us that the inspiration for the video originated from his fascination with Butoh, a style of Japanese modern dance in which dancers are covered in white body paint.

“When starting to conceptualize the video, I would put Butoh performances on YouTube, mute them and let ‘Blind’ play over them,” he said. “It looked really cool, so I knew I wanted something like it to be the video.”

“It needed to be one shot,” he continued, delving deeper into the production of the clip. “Anything can happen, and for the viewer, it’s so cool to get to the end and realize they made it there the whole way without messing up (or messing up and rolling with it). I think we took four complete takes till we got one we liked. Then we just decided to do another one for good measure — and it actually ended up being the final cut.”

James said the video approximates seeing Dead Tooth perform in concert.

“We live in such an edited/TikTok short-form kind of world, where everything is chopped and screwed, that the simplicity of a one-shot, semi-choreographed/interpretive dance seemed really cool,” according to the frontman.

Check out the “Blind” video right here:

For more on Dead Tooth, go to:

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