Mike Viola Is a Pool-Lazing Vampire in ‘Drug Rug’ Video, Featuring Mandy Moore

Legend has it that vampires can’t expose themselves to sunlight, but Mike Viola begs to differ. He’s a pool-lazing vampire in the new video for “Drug Rug,” a track off his upcoming LP Godmuffin.

Directed by Caitlin Gerard, the video opens with Viola lying on a float in Mandy Moore’s pool. “This again?” she asks herself, catching him through her glass window. “What the fuck? Get out of here!”

Viola walks around Los Angeles, saunters by Capitol Records, and takes a selfie with a tourist (Christian Lee Hutson). He lands in someone else’s pool, drinking his blood after the pool’s owner pulls a shotgun. The clip ends with Viola meeting a vampiress (Allie Crow Buckley) and they swim together.

“In a rug full of drugs and with nowhere to go/Only the dead get to heaven,” he sings in the chorus. “Here on earth we just get lost/At least until this stuff wears off.”

Viola will release Godmuffin on December 11th via Good Morning Monkey/Grand Phony. Described as “11 songs about transformation,” the album follows 2018’s The American Egypt. He wrote and recorded it alone in his home studio. “It’s youthful in the chances it takes,” he said of the LP. “It doesn’t give a fuck.”

The album also features “Creeper,” which Viola wrote for Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, who died in April from Covid-19. Schlesinger famously wrote the title track to That Thing You Do! while Viola sang.

“I wrote ‘Creeper’ the morning I got the news my close friend died,” Viola said. “He was my age. Now he can’t make music. I still can. I can still spend my time looking for the secret cause, the next new song, even when it feels too late, ‘cause I still have time.”