You’d expect Dan Bejar to make you work for it. He has built two decades of Destroyer records on that exact contract: oblique lyrical moves, baroque arrangements that reward the patient listener, a studied refusal to meet you halfway. “Bologna“ arrives in early January 2025 and does something else entirely. It doesn’t ask you to chase it. It stops right next to you — like a rare sports car pulling up at the lights — and holds your gaze until the lights change. By which point you’re already in trouble.
What makes this doubly disorienting is that Bejar isn’t even the lead. “Bologna“ marks the first time he’s written a Destroyer song in which he imagines himself as a supporting character, ceding the most load-bearing verses to Fiver‘s Simone Schmidt. His reasoning, delivered in the press release with characteristic bluntness, is hard to argue with: “They needed gravity and grit. The threat of disappearing needed to be real. So I called Simone.” Schmidt‘s voice is tough, expressive, and cuts through the murk of the production like light through fog — not warmly, but precisely. Her presence gives the track a centre of gravity that pulls everything else into orbit.
Then there’s that percussion. Locked in from the first few seconds and never varying, never escalating, just insisting — it’s the engine that makes “Bologna“ do what it does to a room. This is the track you put on when you want to feel like you’re moving through a crowd in slow motion, the world blurring at the edges. The reference points matter: there’s a Portishead quality here, not vocally but structurally — the same timeless melancholy, the same controlled sadness in the architecture. And then Air, specifically the more cinematic corners of ‘Moon Safari‘, translated into something murkier and more contemporary. Slinky guitar lines crouch and wander alongside ascending synths while the beat keeps time with your footsteps. It’s exactly as cinematic as it sounds, and John Collins‘ production has the good sense to stay out of the way of the mood it creates.
David Galloway, who has directed multiple Destroyer videos and brings a genuine visual sensibility to the collaboration, shoots the whole thing in a degraded VHS aesthetic that immediately establishes its terms. The palette is all sickly greens and washed-out greys, the aspect ratio locked at 4:3, and the footage has that slightly queasy quality of found material: something half-remembered, half-incriminating. Galloway describes it as the “panicked frenzy of first-person footage on a long-lost VHS tape,” and that description is accurate without fully preparing you for the effect.
The video splits its attention between Bejar and Schmidt in a way that mirrors the song’s dynamic precisely. From around 0:45, Galloway establishes the central visual contrast: Schmidt is always in motion, operating like a person on the lam, here one minute and gone the next; Bejar is marooned in a dingy green room — the same one that ends up on the ‘Dan’s Boogie‘ album cover — narrating events he can observe but not influence. Cut to drive-thru windows, cheap sunglasses, firefighters beating back flames, drab cityscapes, frozen peas. A car sinking slowly beneath dark water. The VHS imagery isn’t nostalgic set-dressing; it generates a specific kind of unreality, the feeling of watching a memory being replayed incorrectly, which turns out to be exactly the right register for a song about disappearance.
By 2:50, with Schmidt close to the camera and that percussion still refusing to break, the editing syncs tightly enough to the groove that you stop watching the video and start feeling it instead. It’s a subtle move from Galloway, but it’s what makes the whole thing cohere.
Destroyer‘s ‘Dan’s Boogie‘ is out March 28 via Merge Records.
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