John Cale is wearing a priest’s black cassock and a string of pearls where the dog collar should go. A shock of white hair completes the outfit, which he proudly sports in the video to his recent comeback song Story of Blood. In it, he plunges his hands into red pigment as tinted photographs of burials and baptisms flicker by. “This is the story of blood,” he repeats, his weathered voice cradled by the warm alto of Natalie Mering, AKA Weyes Blood. “It moves all around, brings you down.”

“I was trying to suggest things rather than knock people on the head with it,” says Cale, speaking from his adopted home of Los Angeles. But, he laments, “I’m really bad at toning things down.” Death has been on his mind. His new video doesn’t quite have the shock value of his earlier stage antics (think hockey masks, chicken decapitations, blood-spattered mannequins) but Cale is the rare artist who is still surprising his fans, and perhaps himself, even as he enters his 80s.