yves tumor’s “lifetime” struggles with demons

The stylish, dark video that Italian photographer/director Floria Sigismondi created for Yves Tumor’s “Lifetime” continues to confirm what we’ve known since almost the very beginning: the Miami-raised electronic artist is destined to play with big, beautiful ideas, both sonic and visual, that claw at something deeply personal.

The sound of “Lifetime” is indicative of Tumor’s critically acclaimed 2018 album, Safe in the Hands of Love, featuring a grandiosity more in the vein of Nine Inch Nails than of the experimental electronic world that the singer/producer originally emerged from. What remains, though, is the unadulterated emotion that’s long been among the artist’s hallmarks. A feeling of wrestling with particular demons haunts this set of brooding, art- and fashion-inspired images: the red of Yves hair and make-up at sharp contrast with the green-blue grays of the setting, all the way until — quite possibly like those demons — the reds completely consume him. As the lyrics clearly spell it out, “it’s torture.”