The Dear Hunter Drifts Into Animated Sci-Fi With ‘The Glass Desert I – Giants’ Music Video

Progressive rock band The Dear Hunter pairs synth, jazz, and funk musical influences with evocative visuals in the new animated music video for “The Glass Desert I – Giants,” released this week.

A solo effort from lead singer and the band’s founder, Casey Crescenzo, the video unfolds like a visual overture, which it technically is for the band’s next album, Sunya, coming March 20. It introduces a world through movement, scale, and atmosphere rather than straightforward exposition. Its imaginative and expansive landscapes match the band’s well-established tendencies for world-building and lore creation developed over more than two decades together.

Deliberate animation matches the song’s controlled pacing, allowing captivating crystalline horizons to rise and fall with the song’s synth-driven rhythms. A solitary figure drifts in a flying craft through stark landscapes that feel both desolate and monumental, reinforcing a sense of journey without spelling out its destination. It’s a piece that trusts the audience to connect the dots emotionally, not narratively, leading up to a Space Odyssey-style finale that inspires nostalgia for the heyday of MP3 player visualizer graphics.