To listen to Roselit Bone is like embarking on a journey; you’re invited into a nightmarish, cinematic vision of the bleak and the beautiful colliding. A dystopian world, full of ghoulish cowboys, wide-screen barren vistas, and a nagging doubt of whether you’ll even make it out of here with your mind intact.
Roselit Bone started as the brainchild of Joshua McCaslin and now comprises a nine-strong ensemble of flute, trumpets, pedal steel, accordion, violin and more. The band have recently released their second album, Blister Steel, and today we’re premiering the haunting video to one of the record’s stand-out tracks, Leech Child.

Pitched somewhere between the cinematic-grandeur of Timber Timbre and the often brutal darkness of Nick Cave, Leech Child is a lonesome waltz. Twanging, tremulous electric-guitars ring out of a backing of slowly unfurling acoustics and shuffling drum beats, before the whole thing descends into a wall of screaming distortion. The track becomes engulfed in a brutal crescendo of noise, from which nothing emerges but the darkness. The lyrics are suitably dark, hinting at what they describe as, “a future cult in a world drained of hope”.
The accompanying imagery, directed by Joshua himself, is suitably atmospheric. Mirrored images of people and landscapes, distorted by effects and, “chromakey tricks”, take a landscape that should ordinarily be beautiful, and twist it into something alien and nightmarish. The video, like the music it accompanies, is anything but easy-going; Roselit Bone offer a vision of the future, that at times seems all too close to being authentic, and in doing so tap into something primal, brutal and terrifyingly real.
Blister Steel is out now via Friendship Fever. Click HERE for more information on Roselit Bone.
Awesome and mind blowing, as usual.