Commissioned by MASS MoCA, Caviar, and Pioneer Works, and created in collaboration with video director Alex Cook, Son Lux’s video installation Out Into Us (Slow Down) serves as an abstracted embodiment of the title track from Son Lux’s forthcoming ninth studio album, Out Into (September 18, 2026). 

The 17-minute experience of both the song and the music video creates an expressionistic landscape, allowing visitors to inhabit both pieces simultaneously, as opposed to the current trend of condensing and embedding content in a barrage of social media and algorithmic marketing. The installation recenters creativity and exploration, reclaiming forces of deconstruction and fragmentation to channel them toward discovering a song’s essence. The result is a collective, real-world experience rather than scattered and flat moments amidst an individual’s doom scroll. It remixes both message and medium.

In the last decade, social media has created a reality in which music is often eclipsed by visuals, served up in an endless buffet of bite-sized and contextless flavors. The product, or medium, is increasingly the ocean of content and its recontextualization, while the album or song itself is but a small island on the horizon. 

Son Lux’s guitarist Rafiq Bhatia, who led the title track’s rework, took the song apart at the level of tempo itself, drawing on a lineage of artists who used the mechanics of playback as an instrument in its own right. 

“Sound can create a sanctuary — a space in which we can remember what it feels like to be present in our bodies and lost in our thoughts,” says Bhatia. “When you decrease the playback speed of a piece of music, you can really linger in its hidden corners and shadows: passing tensions and moments of release become whole rooms you can step into and stay for a while.”

As a companion to the video installation, Son Lux and MASS MoCA Records will present a limited edition, vinyl release of the score, pressed on pink vinyl, also entitled Out Into Us (Slow Down) (release date: September 12, 2026). Signed copies will be available for a limited time at MASS MoCA’s Research and Development Store. Pre-order now available.

Related Performance:
Son Lux concert with mmeadows
Saturday, September 12, 2026, 8pm
Hunter Center
Learn More and Get Tickets

About Son Lux:

From the start, Son Lux has operated as something akin to a sonic test kitchen. The Academy Award® and BAFTA-nominated band strives to question deeply held assumptions about how music is made, and reconstruct it from a molecular level. What began as a solo project for founder Ryan Lott expanded in 2014, thanks to a kinship with Ian Chang and Rafiq Bhatia too strong to ignore. The trio strengthened their chemistry and honed their collective intuition while creating, releasing, and touring six records, including Brighter Wounds (2018) and triple album Tomorrows (2021). The result is a carefully cultivated musical language rooted in curiosity and balancing opposites that largely eschews genre and structural conventions. And yet, the band remains audibly indebted to iconoclastic artists in soul, hip-hop, and experimental improvisation who themselves carved new paths forward.

Distilling these varied influences, Son Lux searches for equilibrium of raw emotional intimacy and meticulous electronic constructions. Son Lux scored A24’s Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once for which they were nominated for two Academy Awards and a BAFTA. The full score album features new collaborations with Mitski, David Byrne, Randy Newman, and Moses Sumney, among others. They recently scored Marvel Studios’  Thunderbolts* and Bassam Tariq’s upcoming Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother.

About Alex Cook

Alex Cook, a Los Angeles-based director, possesses a unique style characterized by his expressive and evocative imagery. His work has been recognized and featured on NPR, Vimeo Staff Picks, Nowness, Directors Library, and Variety, among others. His short film for Son Lux’s ‘Undertow’ received the “Best Alternative International” award at the UK Music Video Awards in 2023, as well as the Camerimage “Golden Frog” for Best Music Video.

His work has also received an additional nomination at Camerimage and secured the Silver Screen at the Cannes YDA’s, along with garnering recognition at various other awards such as the Young Guns award, Kinsale, Berlin Commercial, and 1.4 Awards, among others.

_{Photo: Son Lux and Alex Cook: Out Into Us (Slow Down), film HR, 2026 (in progress). Courtesy of the artists.}