Watch: Thief – “Closer” [Premiere]

Sydney electronic-pop artist Thief has revealed the new video for “Closer”, taken from his debut EP released last November.

-The lyrical delivery of the chorus in “Closer” is damn-near perfect: “I’m too tired of watching you. Fuck me. Over.” Those pauses – subtle yet abrasive – provide a revelatory double meaning to the line itself; a line written and sung many different ways in many different songs (and spoken many different ways in many different loves).

But this is all lifted to unique heights by PJ Wolf (aka Thief), based solely on the use of strategic breaks of silence. Without those pauses, the song would fall flat – not failing outright, but surely fading into the never-ending sea of self-examining breakup songs.

The video, fittingly, provides the same brand of oscillation between literal, figurative, and nonsensical. Opening with an image of carefully assembled stones and closing with a shot of what appears to be smeared whipped cream, the visual accompaniment proves just as sneakily direct as the song itself.

Thief’s Closer EP is out in the UK on 12 May. Listen to the EP now here. He plays this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.