Even the Mannequins Burn

If the Random Access Memories hype cycle left you with a mild headache behind the eyes, this won’t help. Daft Punk are back with another video, and Julian Casablancas—frontman of The Strokes—appears in it, doing something in the general vicinity of acting while two mannequins in a museum fall in love and eventually get set on fire.

The track is Instant Crush, and despite my lingering ambivalence about everything packaged around what Daft Punk do, the video is genuinely tragic. Two display dummies, incapable of anything except standing there and wanting each other, meet their end as ash. The love story works precisely because it can’t go anywhere. Nobody survives the museum closing.

Love is always tragic. Even between two inanimate objects. Especially between two inanimate objects.