Songfacts®:

• "Industrial Love Song," a tender duet between These New Puritans' Jack Barnett and singer-songwriter Caroline Polachek, tells a love story with a unique twist: it's about two cranes on a construction site (equipment, not birds). "Caroline sings the part of one crane, I sing the other," Barnett told Uncut magazine. "They can't touch, their movements are controlled by the operator. But when the sun rises, they hope their shadows will cross."
• "Industrial Love Song" is the most nakedly emotional song the band recorded to this point, even if the protagonists are made of steel and counterweights. For Barnett, the concept is less absurd than it first sounds.
  
  "As our machines are becoming obsolete, we're becoming obsolete as well," he explained. "We realize how much we have in common with machines. They're more human than we might have thought. So suddenly it becomes less absurd."
• The accompanying video, directed by photographer Harley Weir, a longtime These New Puritans collaborator, is as surreal as the premise demands, with a succession of abstract, symbolic images: a figure with oversized bunny ears; a masked man with his eyes covered; a person entirely sheathed in a translucent goo that could plausibly have been scooped from the Thames. It ends in darkness, with nothing but the faint sound of breathing, as if the cranes have fallen asleep.
• The track appears on Crooked Wing, These New Puritans' fifth album and first in six years. Its story begins in the Peloponnese, where Barnett stumbled across a tiny Byzantine church at the end of a narrow gorge. Naturally, he rang its bell. Naturally, he recorded it.
  
  "A lot of the chord structures on the album grew out of that sound," he told Uncut. "The cacophony of it is incredible. It sets off all kinds of harmonics, these rich, strange chords that sound almost alien because our harmony has evolved away from that. We've always liked music you can't place in time; you don't quite know whether it's ancient or from the future."
• The other dominant sound on Crooked Wing is the pipe organ, recorded largely in an Austrian church. "The great thing about the organ is you can get all these different sounds out of that one instrument," Barnett said. "It's an instrument of fear and love. Some of these stops are 32 or 64 feet long, so before amplified sound, it was earth-shaking sub-bass."
• Despite the ecclesiastical settings, Barnett insists Crooked Wing is not a commentary on religion. "If you want to talk about life and death, that's the way to do it, really," he reasoned. "Our culture and inheritance comes from Christianity, so it's almost automatic to go into that kind of language."