Saoirse Ronan is a real live wire in Talking Heads' new "Psycho Killer" video

The release coincides with the 50th anniversary of the band's first live performance.

By Emma Keates  |  June 5, 2025 | 2:11pm
Screenshot: Talking Heads/YouTube
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Saoirse Ronan is a real live wire in Talking Heads' new
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Everyone is getting involved in Talking Heads’ resurgence. Today, Saoirse Ronan became the latest artist to join the band’s growing ecosystem in a brand new video of “Psycho Killer”—the first they’ve ever released for the 1977 track. The new clip also marks the 50th anniversary of the exact date—June 5—that the band made their live debut, opening for the Ramones at CBGB in 1975.

The Mike Mills-directed video is more American Psycho than full-on bloody murderer. Saoirse Ronan becomes increasingly agitated as she lives through the tedium of her white collar job and unfulfilling lifestyle. Over the course of the video, she screams, dances in her office, talks to herself, and has a breakdown or five as the NPCs around her continuously fail to acknowledge what’s going on. Whether she eventually goes full Patrick Bateman is up to you. “This video makes the song better—We LOVE what this video is NOT—it’s not literal, creepy, bloody, physically violent or obvious,” the band wrote in a press release, per Consequence.

In his own statement, Mills—who helmed films like 20th Century Women and C’mon C’mon—wrote that Talking Heads: 77, the album containing “Psycho Killer,” “literally changed what was possible in life for me… So to get to play with the subversive, uncategorizable beauty of Talking Heads, and to play with Saoirse who brought so much surprise, power, vulnerability and mischief to the party, it’s one of the best things I ever got to be a part of.” Ronan also expressed that to “simply be mentioned in the same breath as Talking Heads is hands down one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me, let alone making a video with the singular Mike Mills.”

The band recently reunited to promote A24’s 2023 re-release of their beloved concert film, Stop Making Sense. To celebrate, the studio also released a cover album called Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute To Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense that pulled even more artists like Lorde, Paramore, and Miley Cyrus into the band’s weird, wonderful world. 

Watch the “Psycho Killer” video below:

 
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