Kevin Bronson on March 3rd, 2020

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“Is it too late for us?” the artist known as Slip asks in “The Patient.” It’s the opening track on Slips’ heady debut album, “The Cost,” a musical mind’s eye to the dread and ennui of modern life (and also an album every Radiohead fan should sample at least once).

The project of singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Taylor Brown, Slip frames his concerns in hypnotic grooves and shadowy atmospherics — and the new video for the “The Patient” manifests all that darkness. Directed by Chanel Williams, the video is set at a remote, abandoned house with something sinister beneath its floorboards. The songwriter himself is cast as “The Patient,” beaten, bloodied and in a stupor, as two men (Nick Gallagher and Lou Acosta) drag him to face a glitchy hologram (Bryan Brazile). At the overlord’s bidding, the workers perform an irreversible procedure on the patient.

It’s a powerful allegory.

“I’m releasing this video on Super Tuesday to stress the fact that we’re in an immensely crucial junction in our shared history as human beings,” Taylor says. “We can choose to push for a more fair and just world, but we have to do it now. We must immediately reverse the exponentially worsening consolidation of wealth, power and technology amongst the elite few. This video is a horrifying take on how bad it could get.”

“The Cost,” co-produced by Brown and Jules de Gasperis, came out in mid-November.

||| Watch: The video for “the Patient”

||| Previously: “The Though of a Past Life Is Comforting,” “The Patient,” “Head on Backwards”

||| Also: Stream the whole album via Spotify