#John Carpenter’s Alive After Death Music Video Arrives Ahead of New Album Next Month

John Carpenter is back with some new music and a creepy music video. “Alive After Death” is the name of the new track, which is from the forthcoming album Lost Themes III: Alive After Death. Sacred Bones Records will put out the new album on February 5th. John Carpenter has found a lot of time to work on new music, while also scoring Halloween Kills with his son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies.

A lot has changed for composer and director John Carpenter since his 2016 album Lost Themes II. Following the release of that album, he went on his first-ever tour, performing material from the Lost Themes albums, along with other music from his classic movie scores. He re-recorded many of those classic movie themes for 2017’s Anthology album, working alongside son Cody Carpenter and godson Daniel Davies. The following year, he was asked to executive produce and compose the music for Halloween Kills, directed by David Gordon Green, which promptly became the highest-grossing installment in the series. Now, he returns with his first album of non-soundtrack music in nearly five years, Lost Themes III: Alive After Death.

The Alive After Death video from the Lost Themes III album features the art of Boneface, who has done work with rock band Queens of the Stone Age in the past. Boneface’s art was animated by Liam Brazier, who brings the artist’s creepy characters to life, while highlighting John Carpenter’s music at the same time. The results are dark and psychedelic, while fitting into Carpenter’s new theme. Horror fans will want to make sure they watch until the very end to try and figure out what is going on in the video.

John Carpenter’s latest focus as a musician has been heightened by his collaboration with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies. The trio has composed and performed throughout this entire new phase of Carpenter’s career, on studio albums, on soundtracks, and onstage. On Lost Themes III: Alive After Death, the trio reaches a new level of creative peaks. Richly rendered worlds are built in the interplay between Davies’s guitar and the dueling synthesizers played by the Carpenters. Carpenter had this to say about the trio’s new song.

“We begin with a theme, a bass line, a pad, something that sounds good and will lead us to the next layer. We then just keep adding on from there. We understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses, how to communicate without words, and the process is easier now than it was in the beginning. We’ve matured.”

John Carpenter called the first Lost Themes album “a soundtrack for the movies in your mind.” On Alive After Death, those movies are even more vivid. Whereas the original Lost Themes album came as a pleasant surprise after years of relative silence from Carpenter, the third installment sees him in the midst of a resurgent moment as a cultural force. The 2018 Halloween score gave his music its biggest audience in decades. You can check out the video for “Alive After Death” above, thanks to the Sacred Bones Records YouTube channel.