Jenny Lewis is feeling weird about re-entering society after a year spent on the couch.
In the new iPhone-shot video for “GLTR,” where once again teamed with Serengeti, Lewis is alone and maskless, splayed out on the grass in her matching grey sweats as puffy clouds drift by. She happens to be in the Hendersonville Memory Gardens, the cemetery north of Nashville where Johnny Cash and members of the Carter Family are interred. But in the video, it might as well be any old cemetery.
Her sweatshirt briefly changes into a cool turquoise sweatshirt with OutKast on the front. A small black dog appears. At some point, it becomes night and Lewis is picking her teeth with a lit sparkler. We’ve all been there.
All of this restlessness is bottled up in the song’s fidgety, hip-hop beat. Serengeti enthusiastically rhymes “Flutie,” “Louie,” “Snoopy,” and “Djibouti.” Clearly, he has also lost his mind. Meanwhile, Lewis moans over the disjointed production. “If I die, leave some glitter on my eye,” she sings, sounding as if someone were playing Madonna’s “Die Another Day” in an area with bad reception.
“GLTR” is the fourth standalone song and iPhone-music-video dispatch from the indie singer-songwriter and the Chicago rapper Serengeti. It follows their recent tracks “Idiot,” “Unblu,” and “Vroom.” Lewis and Serengeti met in 2018, at a music festival in Berlin. But it wasn’t until the lockdowns began in April of 2020 that the duo began collaborating remotely.
Lewis’s last studio album, On the Line, came out in 2019.
