Black International’s new video puts a crazed face on a hard-charging rock epic

When a rock song is racing forward, guitars churning and drums pounding, there’s that exciting moment when it all feels like it’s on the edge of a musical precipice, and the slightest error would send everything collapsing to the ground in a cacophony of sound. Black International’s new single, “Shining Swords,” takes that moment of anxious exhilaration and stretches in out for over five minutes, in an epic swirl of rising and falling post-punk intensity. Racing along with the speed and ferocity of Big Business or Lightning Bolt, but combined with the almost shoegaze-style distortion of a Swervedriver, the Edinburgh two-piece construct a potent rocker, powered by Craig Peebles’ drums and Stewart Allan’s urgent vocals. “Shining Swords is an amalgam of Dunedin-inspired post punk and an interpretation of what Pink Floyd might sound like if they were actually Siouxsie and the Banshees,” Allan tells The A.V. Club. “We wrote it very quickly, one of those lightning-rod moments where the song essentially birthed itself.”