Director Jem Goulding captures the Mystery Jets performing in a desert-scape haze of lens flares and light-bleeds in their official US video for “Someone Purer.” The single is taken from the band’s fourth album, Radlands, released at the end of April (along with the first installment of a three-part graphic novel) and recorded in an old wooden house on the banks of the Colorado River in Austin, Texas. Written by frontman Blaine Harrison following a visit to Big Sur in California, “Someone Purer” was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s book named after the legendary 60s beatnik retreat. “The song has a desperate theme to it, but essentially is about seeing the beauty in things and being saved by faith, whatever that means to you,” explains Harrison. Goulding only had a few days to produce the video while they were trapped in Carlisle in northern England while on tour—spontaneously clambering over barbed wire fences with their equipment to shoot from sunrise to sunset in a local quarry. “A great idea can be summed up in a sentence,” concludes Harrison. “‘Band playing in a desert’ in Carlisle sums up the video.” Here Harrison shares the key survival items he would want if stranded in the wild.

A pencil and a book
To document my slow descent into madness.

The Encyclopaedia of Edible Plants
I would want to know what safe plants, flowers and seeds I could forage and eat because I wouldn’t want to die of starvation like Chris McCandless did in Into the Wild.

A knife
I wouldn’t kill any animals with it because I’m very recently a vegetarian, so I don’t know how long I’d survive. But I guess I would use it for protection and for a shave. A shave always sorts you out after a rotten day in the desert.

In the Night Kitchen, written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak
I’m not religious so I wouldn’t take the Bible or anything, but I guess I’d take a story book, and this was my favorite story growing up—Maurice Sendak is amazing. I’d take that because my mum used to read it to me and I think that having those nice memories to cling to might help me survive a bit longer. 

Radlands is released on April 30 via Rough Trade Records.