Bedouin Soundclash Tap Director Bruce McDonald for 'Brutal Hearts' Video, Featuring Coeur de Pirate -- Premiere

'Brutal Hearts' was one of the standout tracks off Bedouin Soundclash's recent album, 'Light the Horizon,' so when it came time to make a music video for the tune, the Toronto outfit knew better than to hastily slap something together. To visualize the moody love song -- which features frontman Jay Malinowski's former flame, Quebecois chanteuse Coeur de Pirate -- they called in Canadian director Bruce McDonald (the beloved director behind 'Hard Core Logo' and Broken Social Scene's concert-drama 'This Movie Is Broken').

"Working with him was a huge deal for me," Malinowski tells Spinner. "Growing up, 'Hard Core Logo' was such a seminal movie for kids my age, kids who were playing in punk bands, so to be able to work with him, this mysterious director, it was really cool."

McDonald's cinematic take on 'Brutal Hearts' -- which we're premiering below along with a special 'Scene 2' clip -- effortlessly captures the sultry vibe of the number, which Malinowski calls "an anti-hero love song."

"It's a guy singing basically about using someone to numb his pain," he says, "and then there's the girl in that relationship, too."

"It's a beautiful song," says McDonald, who tried to summon the "lovely, floating, dreamy mood" of the music with his ode to French New Wave cinema, perhaps as a hat-tip to Malinowski's then-muse. "The video is always good when the song is good," he demurs.

As Malinowski explains, the footage captured while parading around his neighbourhood, Toronto's famed Kensington Market, actually yielded enough material for two videos, each with slightly different visuals.

"Bruce is quite of a free-form type guy; he was just shooting everything. What we started out with was Beatrice [Martin aka Coeur de Pirate] and me biking through the city and all these skeletons start appearing and then we meet up at the park, and by these two people coming together we get rid of the skeletons in the closet. But I don't think any of the skeletons really made it in."