Dance of the Clairvoyants is the first single from Pearl Jam‘s upcoming album Gigaton, available for preorder now and out March 27, 2020 in the US.
Pearl Jam teased the album on Friday, January 10th via a virtual scavenger hunt using geo coordinates. When viewed via the augmented reality Facebook and Instagram “gigaton” filter / lens, fans were rewarded with the image “Ice Waterfalls” by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen. Through the filter, the image’s clouds and waterfalls became animated and an audio clip looped wind howling, ice fracturing and falling with ambient music.
“Ice Waterfalls” is striking photo capturing the meltwater runoff from an ice cap on the island of Nordaustlandet, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago and also the album art of Pearl Jam’s Gigaton. This was not the first time the band used a scavenger hunt to debut their album art.
The Dance of the Clairvoyants single art features a predominantly green aurora, with hues of red, pink, purple orange. An aurora, sometimes referred to as polar lights, northern lights, or southern lights, is a natural light display in the Earth’s sky, predominantly seen in the high-latitude regions. Auroras are the result of disturbances in the magnetosphere caused by solar wind.
In review, we have:
-
Album Name – Gigaton
A gigaton is what scientists use to measure the loss of ice from Earth’s largest ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. -
Album Art – “Ice Waterfalls”
National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen is also the co-founder of SeaLegacy, an organization dedicated to ocean protection. -
Single Name – Dance of the Clairvoyants
A clairvoyant means having or exhibiting an ability to perceive events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact.
There’s an obvious theme of climate change, ocean conservation and
ecoawareness that the band is strongly focusing on. It’s no surprise
considering they’ve been allocating a portion of tour profits to invest in environmental projects that serve to offset or mitigate carbon dioxide that has been released into the atmosphere while on their tours since 2003.
This Gigaton
album announcement was clearly a very thoughtful, well planned release
meant to not only excite, but also engage and educate fans. Every single
part of it was executed with a purpose – using social media for good.
This got us thinking: we have the names, the aesthetic and the
theme – but are we missing something from the scavenger hunt, like say
the ambient music heard using the filter? Could that clip be from Dance of the Clairvoyants or another song off the new album? Can we expect a more ethereal, meta sound on this album, maybe in the vein of Strangest Tribe or Pendulum? Will
they be tempered with some heavy bangers expressing the band’s outrage
that the future of the planet is sitting squarely on our doorstep and
we’re too busy staring at our screens letting politics and
ignorance divide us instead of uniting us towards a common, necessary
goal?
Given everything that’s gone on with the album announcement, we can’t wait to see what Dance of the Clairvoyants and Gigaton has in store – and we don’t need to be a clairvoyant to know that the future is now.
- Calculate your carbon foot print here.
- Global Climate Change – Vital Signs of the Planet
- Join the SeaLegacy movement
Quicklink: https://tinyurl.com/docpred
Written by Laura Trafton
Research provided by: Romy Bianchi, Anthony Krysiewicz, Brad Laing, Rob & Jenny Wallack Schenk, Samia Dillsi, Jen Belle, Allison Goldberg
