Video premiere: Miner, ‘Better Instincts’

Daiana Feuer on October 20th, 2015

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For their follow-up to 2014’s debut, “Into The Morning,” Miner spent five weeks recording in Seattle with Phil Ek, known for producing Fleet Foxes, the Shins, Modest Mouse and Band of Horses, to name a few. The new album is called “Tuanaki,” after an island in the South Pacific discovered by sailors in 1842, which vanished into the sea shortly thereafter. The band went big with the video for first single “Better Instincts,” which has an epic soundscape intro fit for “Lord Of The Rings.” Once the tune itself kicks in, we’re brought back from fantasy to the land of folk rock, aka the beautiful central coast of California, where the handsome Justin Miner is chased around by a cloaked figure reminiscent of Darth Maul.

The video is beautiful and majestic, thanks to director Justin Krook and cinematographer Michael Dwyer, who Miner describes as “a wizard” (and the fantasy lingo just keeps building inadvertently …). The song “explores the perpetual inner battle between our aspirations and darker impulses — a battle often lost despite our best intentions,” Miner says. “We decided to personify the narrator’s worst instincts as the cloaked figure — and make the attempted escape from those tendencies literal. In reality, the cloaked figure is simply a part of himself that he’d rather forget, and therefore something he may not be able to outrun.”

As the video reaches culmination, there’s an amazing shot where the singer literally jumps off a cliff. We wanted to know exactly how that worked. “It was the final shot of the day, and basically we just went for it. There’s a small patch of rocks as a landing pad off the edge that I nearly slid off on each of the three or so takes, at which point my wife called it a wrap before I ended up in the ocean.” He survived there, but Miner did not make it through the video unscathed. “I took a pretty good spill in the redwood scene and ripped my shirt open which shut down shooting for a bit while we sewed me back up — so we had to shoot around the big, bloodied seam on my back from there on out.” That’s kind of a sexy heroic image, the whole shirt ripping open thing. Nice for wife and bandmate Kate, who has her own beautiful elfin thing going on here.

||| Watch: “Better Instincts”