Watch David Bowie’s New Video for ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ With Tilda Swinton

This week David Bowie released the sec­ond sin­gle from his upcom­ing album, The Next Day. It’s called “The Stars (Are Out Tonight),” and the accom­pa­ny­ing video (shown above) builds on Bowie’s life­long explo­ration of androg­y­ny.

Bowie is joined in the minia­ture film by actress Til­da Swin­ton, who plays his wife, and the mod­els Andrej Pejic and Sask­ia De Brauw, who play a pair of young celebri­ties who mock and tor­ment the aging cou­ple. Swin­ton looks like Bowie, and Pejic and DeBrauw look like Bowie and Swin­ton.

The sto­ry “cap­tures a twen­ty first cen­tu­ry moment in its con­ver­gence of age, gen­der and the normal/celebrity divide,” accord­ing to a state­ment post­ed ear­li­er this week on Bowie’s Face­book page. It was direct­ed by the Ital­ian-born film­mak­er Flo­ria Sigis­mon­di, a pro­lif­ic music video mak­er best known for her 2010 fea­ture film, The Run­aways.

The Next Day will be released on March 12. To learn more about it and to watch the first video from the album, see our post from last month, “David Bowie Cel­e­brates 66th Birth­day with First New Song in a Decade, Plus Vin­tage Videos.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Zig­gy Star­dust: How David Bowie Cre­at­ed the Char­ac­ter that Made Him Famous

How “Space Odd­i­ty” Launched David Bowie to Star­dom: Watch the Orig­i­nal Music Video From 1969

Backed by 157 Musi­cians, Beck Reimag­ines David Bowie’s 1977 Clas­sic, “Sound and Vision”