#The Shins Share Video for New Song “The Great Divide”: Watch

The Shins have released their first new song of 2020. “The Great Divide” arrives with a Paul Trillo–directed music video. Watch it below.

“The Great Divide” was co-written and produced by Shins frontman James Mercer, Jon Sortland, and Yuuki Matthews. Mercer released the single and visual via his own label Aural Apothecaryand Monotone Records.

In a press release, James Mercer wrote that “The Great Divide” is “a blend of futurism and nostalgia.” He continued, “We used everything from vintage synthesizers to iPhones, from a sixties Ludwig kit to an 808. It’s an epic about longing and love in a broken world. I guess we wanted to try to provide a bit of warmth and sentiment in hard times.”

In addition to Paul Trillo’ direction, Jon Sortland provided creative direction for “The Great Divide” video. “While the track feels intimate lyrically, the performance called for something visually vast in scale,” Sortland wrote in press materials.

Trillo added:

For me, “The Great Divide” is about coming to a turning point. The theme of the song speaks to this palpable rift we’re all feeling right now. So when Jon Sortland first reached out with a flurry of ideas, I got really excited at what this could be. We knew we wanted to craft something as grand as the song; something that was both wildly surreal yet also resonates on a human level. I wanted to place the current state of things, this “Great Divide” we’re going through, within the larger context of the universe. Like the song itself, It was both timely and timeless. That’s when I sort of stumbled on this idea of an infinite zoom out through time. The song also has this entrancing quality that keeps pulling you in further and further, so that continual motion made a lot of sense.