Son Lux’s newest music video is an atmospheric mini-epic. Last month, the video premiered at MASS MoCA—the piece is a joint commission by the museum and Pioneer Works and made in collaboration with Alex Cook—as an immersive, 17-minute installation titled “Out Into Us (Slow Down),” complementing the release of the band’s ninth studio album.

“In the last decade, social media has created a reality in which music is often eclipsed by visuals, served up in an endless buffet of bite-sized and contextless flavors,” says a statement. For this multimedia work, the artists leaned instead toward deeply felt human experiences, like how long it can take to do or understand something. Portraying a multigenerational family seated around a table and passing the time in one another’s company, the video transports us back at least a century as scenes of a giant dust cloud evoke the Dust Bowl.

Cook conjures tension, atmosphere, and moments of disrupted reality in a slippage of past and present. The Dust Bowl itself was inherently linked to an intense period when homesteaders, dreaming of prosperous lives for themselves, plowed vast swaths of prairie for their farms. In the process, they uprooted native grasses that held the topsoil in place. Then, exacerbated by drought, millions of acres of topsoil eroded completely from the Great Plains’ persistent and powerful winds, sending farms and habitats into ruin.

Taking surprisingly meta turns, the the sound and visuals provoke curiosity, togetherness, hope, and grief. The family passes delicious dishes around the table and works on a puzzle depicting an idealized landscape in the tradition of the Hudson River School—a far cry from their depicted reality, yet a type of historical propaganda that helped entice homesteaders to the plains. These bucolic tableaux and their romantic ideals could even be said to have functioned something like social media does today, as a way to spread information. Instead, Cook and Son Lux confront us—watch to the end—with quite another definition of a screen.

“Sound can create a sanctuary—a space in which we can remember what it feels like to be present in our bodies and lost in our thoughts,” says the band’s guitarist, Rafiq Bhatia. “When you decrease the playback speed of a piece of music, you can really linger in its hidden corners and shadows: passing tensions and moments of release become whole rooms you can step into and stay for a while.”

See more on Cook’s Vimeo.