Indie folk outfit Blitzen Trapper have channeled the late Michael Jackson in their latest single “Dead Billie Jean,” from their upcoming album release Holy Smokes Future Jokes. This upcoming project will be released on September 11 via Yep Roc Records.

“Dead Billie Jean” is accompanied by a visualizer created by Endless Endless, which shows a red high heel slowly disintegrate as the song plays on. This track is a continuation of the story set in Michael Jackson’s pop hit Billie Jean and explores her misadventures in the afterlife following her suicide, where she falls in with the likes of dead rock stars such as Jim Morrison and Brian Jones.  The song’s instrumental is filled with jangly orchestral strings and acoustic guitars, blended in with an ethereal atmosphere backed by the soothing vocals.

“Pulling together Saunder’s ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ and MJ’s ‘Billie Jean’ wherein the real Billie Jean has indeed killed herself as she promised Michael she would and now living in a state of rock and roll immortality kicks it in the Intermediate States with Jim Morrison, Brian Jones and Abraham Lincoln(?!) smoking mad dope, though she remains unaware of her death somehow as though her death ultimately was an awakening and reinvention,” the band’s frontman Eric Earley stated in a press release.

The band’s unique otherworldly style was also on the forefront of their previously released single “Masonic Temple Microdose #1,” which handled the subject with a more nuanced tone as it discussed American apathy. Blitzen Trapper’s most recent studio album release Wild & Reckless came out in 2017.