Yum is the first track on Ty’s new album UGLY – it’s this industrial purging of a lot of behaviours he’s jostled with in the last few years, before there’s a huge sonic and thematic shift in the record – Yum is just there to shake you by the shoulders and get you to pay attention. Ty wanted this thing to breathe, to have these long moments where you can drink in the anxiety of it all.

Please tell us how the treatment evolved – for instance what was behind your decision to use large landscape angles cut with close-up shots. 

That whole opening sequence was one we’d had in our heads for a while – but the layer of Ty holding Rain (his son) and the inner dichotomy of the wreckhead vs the responsible dad heightened the whole sequence. For us that sequence captures the whole concept and feeling of the track – the duality between states in the psyche and the push/pull of it.

The narrative of the song is quite clear, there’s discussions with therapists, there’s descriptions of hedonism – and all of these things we relate to heavily in our own growth as people so it really was a bit of a dream tune really – you’re only going to get to explore these themes with a song like this probably once in your career so we dug deep.

Really the loops of addiction are the guiding hand of the structure, the rotating camera, Ty ending up back in his therapists lap before being dragged off again by unseen forces, and it just repeats – just like addiction. We wanted to play heavily with references to psychology which is a big interest of ours.

This one was a bit of mix – huge sections of the video are figured out to the millisecond – but there’s a lot of gut decisions in this one too – we just knew we had to capture the intensity of the tune otherwise there’s no point in marrying a visual to this tune. With a song like this you’ve got to stay open to chaos.

Any major challenges and how did you resolve them?

Oh when isn’t there!? We had all sorts of things – the biggest was probably that the therapy scenes which form the backbone of the whole thing were shot in nowhere near enough time – we had some scheduling issues on the day which meant that whole sequence got really compressed and it was probably the most stressful moment on a shoot we’ve had, as we knew without nailing that scene we didn’t really have the crux of the concept in hand. Regardless we put our heads together and simplified coverage – got economic on it and somehow, somehow managed.

Tim Smith @ Number 8 is truly a wizard – that being said there’s so, so much work that goes into palettes in our stuff, and it’s nice that people are recognising that we’re crafting a bit of a different look. We DP’d our own work for so many years that there’s a big confidence in our technical ability and to know how to get the best results from an image.

Jack Exton who DP’d this one with us was truly fantastic and such an invaluable member of the squad on this one – he really put the hours into this one. It’s a mad video to approach with visual coherency as there’s just so many scenes but we’re really proud of how everyone came together to get something tangible from it.

Are there any scenes that were cut?

Oh yes. We shot this in two days and we just didn’t stop shooting really. We were still worried there wasn’t enough up until about four days before the video dropped – scheduling squeezed us as it was just an absurdly ambitious shot-list but we knew we needed SO much. Sending Ty into a kebab shop alone with a spinning camera rig attached to him with no warning for anyone inside was a real highlight. That’s the best thing about him – we’ve put him through so much shit over the years – waterboarding him, pinning his eyes open, dragging him about floors of abandoned buildings, covering him in bird shit, tar and feathering him, to name a few – can’t believe he keeps asking us to go again at this point.

Behind the scenes on showthai, Yum shoot: 

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