I doubt Kurt Feldman was being coy when The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart drummer told me in December that nothing new was coming in 2020 from his side project, Ice Choir. Still, today did bring the premiere of a music video for “Everything Is Spoilt By Use,” a track from Ice Choir’s debut, Afar (one of Popservations’ top albums of 2012).

A duet with Chairlift‘s Caroline Polachek, “Everything Is Spoilt By Use” is now accompanied by a clip directed by Feldman’s singing partner.

“I was a huge fan of Kurt’s work, so naturally I said yes when he asked me if I’d sing the duet with him,” Polachek tells Dazed. “But when he first read me the lyrics, I got chills at the line: “…so put your tension on the strings, echoing a warning…”. It sounded just as much like bondage as possessive parenting, or a master’s snarls to his ‘kept woman’ (hi Freud), but in context, it was more about the containment of imagination, and the unnatural prevention of decay. I’d wanted to make a video for the song since that session, so when the holidays brought me home from tour, I staged it as a digital-Victorian (soap) opera. While editing the video, the plastic wrapping kept turning up in my dreams, and became a theme on the streets of Brooklyn. It really got inside me as a symbol. Now I would love for this song to end up as some quiet teenager’s figure skating routine. Because this song is gothic as goth can get; no doomy trappings of the genre, but all the pining and excess.”

Purchase Ice Choir – “Everything Is Spoilt By Use” via iTunes, Amazon MP3.