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Holy Shit

Jesu and Sun Kil Moon Are Happy Michael Jackson Is Dead on “He’s Bad”

It’s seems to be the first track from the newly-announced ’30 Seconds to the Decline of Planet Earth,’ out in 2017.

Photo via Justin K Broadrick on Instagram

Mark Kozalek has been working with Justin Broadrick on some Sun Kil Moon/Jesu collaborations for a while now, releasing a delightfully heavy and odd album at the start of this year and promising that more would be in the works. Today he and Broadrick announced the release of another new album, 30 Seconds to the Decline of Planet Earth, for June 1 of next year. Yes, that's an awfully long way off. But they also released “He’s Bad” to accompany the announcement.

"He's Bad" is a typically pretty piece of work with typically difficult subject matter. Kozalek finds himself revelling in the death of Michael Jackson in light of recent reports of his criminal activities. It has everything you might expect from melancholy’s antagonist-in-chief: a pretty guitar line, stream-of-consciousness lyrics, emotional weight, and the odd annoying line that makes you want to punch him square in the face. Sometimes that happens all at once, too: “I’m sorry for the bad things his father did to him,” he mumbles, “but it doesn’t add up to building a Willy Wonka trap for kids and changing the color of your God-given skin.” Eventually, he boils it down to something more simple: “He’s dead and to me it ain’t that fuckin’ sad / He didn’t stop ’til he got enough.”

You can listen to the whole thing here.