[Premiere] It's a Yearbook From Hell in Maestro's "Darlin' Celsa" Music Video

It's not how we remembered high school, but then again, we didn't go to "Mount Madness Academy."

May 6, 2015, 4:00pm

Your old high school yearbook is either a treasure trove of nostalgic goodness or a closet full of skeletons, but in "Darlin' Celsa," the third single from Maestro's debut album, Mountains of Madness (out now on Tigersushi)—and the first music video from directors, Parachutes—it's even darker than the latter. Inside a dusty attic, as a man who looks an awful lot like Willem Dafoe glazes over the pages of the 1974 annual from "Mount Madness Academy," the portraits bubble to life (and death) with both hilarious and bloodcurdling results.

"Darlin' Celsa is a song about a nymphomaniac girl who was in my class at school," explains Mark "The Butcher" Kerr, 1/2 of the duo whose "Thriller Killer" vid appeared on THUMP back in February. "She didn't want me. I was too shy. I'm not so shy anymore." It's "a college story about love, frustration, deception and revenge…" according to the video's description, "introducing Celsa, the only girl of the school."

GIFs by Beckett Mufson, via

"At the beginning of Celsa there was this obsessional vocal loop I couldn't help myself singing… What was it about?" asks Fred "The Alchemist" Soulard, Maestro's other half. "It was at the beginning of Maestro. If Mark wouldn't have been there I would certainly still be singing it all day long, like a Swiss cuckoo, trying to understand why."

For this, their music video debut, Parachutes decided to keep things in the family, kind of like a high school clique. "Some retro accents of the track made us think of American colleges prom nights…" they tell The Creators Project, "so the idea of a yearbook came pretty quick…" If the faces you see drowning, exploding, and/or on fire look familiar, that's because they're cameos from famous figures in the French music scene. "We set up a little studio in the back of our office in Paris, and every day for a few weeks friends of Maestro, Tigersushi Records and ours came to have their portrait shot," Parachutes explains. "We had so many laughs while animating all of them, scattering details all over… We'd love people to discover new stuff while watching it again and again!"

The Darlin' Celsa EP comes out at the end of May, featuring remixes and edits from DyE, Pilooski, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Severed Heads. Click ahead for more from Maestro, Parachutes, and Tigersushi.