A condemned man disrupts his own public execution, denying the crowd the ending they came for, in Alex Takács's gripping 'acid western' for JJerome87 - the new solo project by alt-J's Joe Newman.

Set on a barren mesa grassland, the video for Brush Me Like A Horse follows an intriguing and wild narrative, set on a barren mesa grassland in Agua Dulce, Santa Clarita - where a grotesque event unfolds. As crowds gather with picnic baskets and binoculars, a television host narrating the proceedings with pageant-level bravura, the man whose crime is never disclosed is marched toward his public execution - by a highly original method.

A longtime collaborator of Newman’s - as Young Replicant he has made videos for Alt-J, the UKMVA-winning video for 3WW and Deadcrush - Takács stages the film as a sun-bleached fever dream, somewhere between a Sergio Leone western and a twisted daytime game show. With the video's semi-desert setting the inventively cruel instrument of execution, a metal cage that includes a treadmill perched over a yawning cliffdrop, could have been inspired by a Wile E. Coyote cartoon.

But as Takacs racks up the tension in this bizarre scenario, it sharpens into something genuinely unsettling. With no context for the man’s alleged crime, the viewer is left without moral clarity, forced to consider whether any wrongdoing could justify a punishment so extreme. As the pageantry swells around the accused, the question becomes whether he can deny the crowd of consuming the ending they came for.

“Brush Me Like a Horse is an acid western about a man condemned to die in a cruel, humiliating public spectacle," says Takács. "Joe Newman came to me with the vivid image of a state execution via treadmill, and it immediately conjured this whole narrative world.

"In Joe’s songwriting, the images are layered and nested inside one another: a man is accused, the accused is a horse, the horse is a mouse in a field where cats roam. The track already contained multiple voices and characters; it cut so many strong silhouettes that my job was simply to fill them in.”

This is quite an introduction to Joe Newman's new project, hugely ambitious in its storytelling. A departure befitting this ne musical direction, but it also fits comfortably into the greater canon of Alt-J videos.