This happy version of “Hurt” is somehow even more bleak

“When I first played back the first draft of this song, I thought to myself, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this,’” he says at the outset of this video, wherein he attempts to add some pep to Johnny Cash’s ”Hurt,” itself a Nine Inch Nails cover. The result is heavy on jaunty piano plinks and an overload of glockenspiel; Yaog’s voice is eerily soulless, making the song’s refrain of “I will make you hurt” sound like something you’d hear floating over a mall’s food court.

This all stands in stark contrast to the ghost-giving death rattle of Cash’s vocals, which we’ve previously described as “a dying man’s profound existential reckoning.” Cash’s rendition of “Hurt” is such an intimate, revealing, and heartrending one that this feels more like blasphemy. Regardless, let’s all recover by listening this mournful piano cover of “Dammit” by Blink 182.