Watch Run The Jewels & Zack De La Rocha's Confronting New Clip

The video for Run The Jewels and ex-Rage Against The Machine frontman Zack De La Rocha's collaborative single Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck) was uploaded to YouTube overnight and, in the handful of hours it's been live, it has already blitzed across the internet.

Mere seconds into the clip, it's easy to see why — the artists, in partnership with director A.G. Rojas, have delivered an incredibly powerful, devastatingly confronting narrative of a young black man and a white police officer engaged in the kind of altercation that has become all too frequent on the streets of the US. Affectingly, the director/band have chosen to leave in the audio of the fight, mixed low enough so as not to detract from the song but high enough to be unignorable, as the pair brawl ceaselessly, pointlessly, reflexively. It's seriously powerful stuff.

In a statement about the track, Rojas explained: "When Run The Jewels sent me this track, I knew we had the opportunity to create a film that means something. I felt a sense of responsibility to do just that. We had to exploit the lyrics and aggression and emotion of the track, and translate that into a film that would ignite a valuable and productive conversation about racially motivated violence in this country.

"It's provocative, and we all knew this, so we were tasked with making something that expressed the intensity of senseless violence without eclipsing our humanity. For me, it was important to write a story that didn’t paint a simplistic portrait of the characters of the Cop and Kid. They're not stereotypes. They're people - complex, real people and, as such, the power had to shift between them at certain points throughout the story.

"The film begins and it feels like they have been fighting for days, they’re exhausted, not a single punch is thrown, their violence is communicated through clumsy, raw emotion. They've already fought their way past their judgments and learned hatred toward one another. Our goal was to highlight the futility of the violence, not celebrate it.”

Indeed, the futility of violence is a recurring theme in the band's commentary about the clip, with El-P describing it as "a vision of a seemingly never-ending struggle whose participants are pitted against each other by forces originating outside of themselves", while partner Killer Mike attests that "this video represents the futile and exhausting experience of a purgatory-like law enforcement system".

"There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world," he said.

Run The Jewels recently experienced some pretty futile violence of their own when a stage invader got physical with Killer Mike during their set at South By Southwest just over a week ago, resulting in the rapper sustaining a shoulder injury in the fracas.