Bad Omens have shared the atmospheric, cinematic and unsettling video for their powerful new single Specter.
The single represents the first brand new music released by the Richmond, Virginia metalcore band since 2022's The Death of Peace of Mind album, which has now racked up over 2.7 billion streams globally.
The band teased the release of Specter earlier this week on their social media pages, with a series of mysterious, unnerving videos featuring Sons Of Anarchy / The Walking Dead actor Ryan Hurst playing an authority figure trying to conduct an interview with a young boy, who was hiding beneath a white bedsheet.
"Oh I’m changing, and I feel more like a ghost," frontman Noah Sebastian sings at one point. "Like a specter in your headlights on the road."
The song's chorus, meanwhile, pivots on the lyric, "Do you feel love? I know I don’t with no one to hold."
Watch the video, co-directed by Noah Sebastian, below.
Anticipation for new music from Sebastian's band has been growing since photos posted on Bad Omens' social media accounts last September revealed that they were at work in a recording studio. And last month, during an appearance at Summerfest in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the frontman told the watching crowd, "I'm a little tired, tired from working on these albums".
Speaking to Metal Hammer in February 2024, Sebastian hinted at the direction Bad Omens' new music might take.
“It’s hard to imagine myself in my late 30s even playing heavy, core-based music,” the 29-year-old musician admitted. “You know, especially with how eclectic my musical interest is. I would like to think I’ll always be fond of the darker aspects of art and life and emotion. I think they’ll always be the paints that I use on my canvas when it comes to making art. But I think my main goal is to always do that tastefully, and in a way that feels true to me as a person and not forced.”
Sebastian was adamant, however, that this did not imply that his band were set to release "a bubblegum pop record" next.
“I don’t know why people think that," he said. "I think it’s a metalhead thing, because metalheads like to put a blanket over anything that isn’t metal. They just think anything that’s remotely catchy or polished is pop, and anything that’s electronic is EDM. As if there aren’t 20, 30 subgenres to those the same way metal has subgenres. I feel like metal fans forget that other genres have that as well.
"But it’s coming out really cool," he said of his work-in-=progress, "and it feels true to, without sounding too spiritual, the voice in my head and whatever it’s feeling right now.”
