Photo Courtesy of http://mtv.mtvnimages.com
“Maps” is the lead single off of Maroon 5’s upcoming album “V”, to be released on September 2nd, 2014. The fifth studio album of the group features Gwen Stefani on a track, brings back keyboardist Jesse Carmichael who had been on hiatus the past two years, and production by masterminds Ryan Tedder, Shellback, Sam Martin, Max Martin, and Benny Blanco.
The video for “Maps” was directed by – wait for it – “Friday Night Lights” director Peter Berg! He even makes a cameo in a FNL tshirt. This video is a tearjerker, too, despite the song’s upbeat, danceable style known to Maroon 5. Frontman Adam Levine’s heartsick theme continues in the vein of “Wake Up Call” (his girlfriend cheats), “Misery” (stuck in a brutal back-and-forth relationship), and “One More Night” (when his wife leaves). The video for “Maps”, however, brings even more drama to the table, if possible.
Premiered Tuesday, July 1st, 2014 on MTV, the new video opens with Levine rushing into a hospital emergency room, clearly distraught, and clearing acting. Once he finds the room he’s looking for, he’s stopped dead in his tracks by the sight of a woman lying unconscious, in critical condition, surrounded by doctors and paramedics. Her face is ripped to shreds, not breathing, no heartbeat, and her eyes a torpid white.
Violently distressed in his grief, Levine is restrained by a couple of paramedics, and begins to retrace the events of the night in his memory. His ladylove was hit by a car after becoming aggravated by a creepy homeless man. She was walking alone on the sketchy street in the first place because she stormed out of a party, at which Levine recalls he had been getting a little too familiar with another woman. Suddenly the heartache sets in as he realizes it’s all his fault.
Will she wake up? Will they make up? We never know, as the camera pans into the bright white surgical lamp. Although the heart-wrenching video may have you a little teary-eyed, (a possibly even a little nauseated) the new song “Maps” will have you just as stoked on Maroon 5 as you ever were. After a two-year long break since their last hit album “Overexposed” was released in 2012, Maroon 5 fans have a lot to look forward to on their upcoming album “V” which features the single “Maps.”
Levine told MTV that, “This album is very much all over the place. There’s some stuff on our record that sounds a little like early Maroon 5, and then there’s some stuff that sounds like the newer direction that we went in,” he told us. “We thought we’d get back to certain elements that we’d been missing out on for a while with our original sound, but also bridge the gap with the new stuff that we’ve been doing. I think it’s an all-encompassing kind of record.”
You can watch the premier video here.