Danny Elfman remakes Oingo Boingo tune on long awaited solo album

After releasing a series of singles over the past few months, Danny Elfman confirms that his first solo album in 37 years, titled Big Mess, is due June 11 through Anti-/Epitaph.

Multimedia artist Sarah Sitkin created the video for Elfman’s new single release “True.” Watch it HERE.

“The video is an exploration of fractured identity, muffled through the lens of memory,” Sitkin says. “Danny is a central figure within the video, yet only in his reproduced likeness via prosthetics, masks and 3D printed body parts. I wanted to make a video that was gritty, unpolished and uncomfortable.”

The double album finds the Grammy and Emmy Award-winning composer drawing on a dystopian palette of distorted electric guitars, industrial synthesizers and orchestra. He is joined on the album by drummer Josh Freese (Devo, Weezer, Vandals), bassist Stu Brooks (Lady Gaga), and guitarists Robin Finck (NIN, Guns N’ Roses) and Nili Brosh (Tony MacAlpine, Paul Gilbert).

Big Mess was almost entirely created spontaneously during quarantine in 2020. It began as an experiment Elfman had been considering which combined aggressive rock band and orchestral strings in a way that had not been heavily explored.

“Once I began writing,” he explained, “It was like opening a Pandora’s box and I found I couldn’t stop. None of it was planned. I had no idea how many songs I would write but from the start it quickly became a 2-sided project with heavily contrasting and even conflicting tones."

The songs on Big Mess combine both harmonically complex arrangements and simple high energy driving music with biting, acerbic wit as they reckon with the chaos and confusion of the modern world.

“2020 was an intense year, to say the very least,” Elfman says. Big Mess is an often explicitly political record— “Choose Your Side”, “Serious Ground” and “Sorry” all anchor themselves in the political intensity of our times. Even a reworked Oingo Boingo song, “Insects,” transforms itself into a meditation on the greed and sickness of the American ruling class—but Big Mess is also a deeply personal work, with others songs revealing more than in the past.

“I knew from the start that this wasn’t going to be a neat, easy-to-categorize record,” says Elfman. “It was always destined to be this crazy cacophony, because that’s who I am. The 'Big Mess' is me.”

The album artwork was also created by Sarah Sitkin from a series of 3D body scans and designed and art directed by Berit Gwendolyn Gilma.

Elfman is also releasing a limited edition Big Mess box set this fall. This collector’s edition contains the full album along with unreleased remixes and alternate versions of songs. Additionally, the package will include collectable artwork, a unique USB with video content and bonus material, and an exclusive artbook featuring Sarah Sitkin’s original creations and never before seen photos and ephemera. More details and information to come.

Pre-Order ‘Big Mess’

Track listing:

1. Sorry
2. True
3. In Time
4. Everybody Loves You
5. Dance With The Lemurs
6. Serious Ground
7. Choose Your Side
8. We Belong
9. Happy
10. Just A Human
11. Devil Take Away
12. Love In The Time Of Covid
13. Native Intelligence
14. Better Times
15. Cruel Compensation
16. Kick Me
17. Get Over It
18. Insects

photo: Jacob Boll