Jude Icarus is a New York based musical and performance artist with an eye for contrasts: between beauty and ugliness, human and mechanical, intimacy and alienation, control and loss. His work is darkly cinematic, both in the evocative scope of his songwriting and the expansive visual world around it.

Layers of abstract vocals swell, masked crowds writhe, industrial drums crash, a dancer pirouettes underwater. Like the nostalgia of ruins or the romanticism of disaster, it’s a world tinged with grief and tenderness within a jagged, surreal cityscape.

Jude himself is a creature of contradictions—by his own admission a relentless tinkerer obsessed with imperfections and flaws. His songs are laced with artifacts: tape hiss, the creak of a metal hinge, the dull thud of piano pedals, field recordings of conversations and wind. But he confesses that he tweaks arrangements and vocal processing obsessively, even well into the mixing process. “I want things to be the right kind of broken,” he says. That same impulse extends to his video work, which he directs and often edits himself, and which makes heavy use of practical effects. The song isn’t complete, he insists, until the video is.

It’s not that he wants to do everything himself (he laughs when asked if he’s sure about this) but that his vision is both hyper-specific and grand in scale. There’s a larger story here than any one song. “It’s a story in two parts,” he says, “The first part is about connection, it’s about holding onto love like an anchor in the dark.” And what about the second part? “An anchor can ground you, but it can also sink you.”

For more about Jude Icarus and his work, check out his HV Artist Member page.

Or visit his artist website and follow him on social media.