Kaputt

"Kaputt" is the sixth song on the album, 6:18, written by Bejar, and it has a video, the first Destroyer ever made, by Dawn Garcia, released on January 5, 2011. In an NPR Singled Out piece in January 2011 Bejar called it his favorite track because it contains the album's core ideas, the song where they rage at the utmost from beginning to end, which came together pretty easily; the lyrics are drifting little passages, the song had once been called "The Cocaine Addicts", and he linked the chorus's references to 1980s English music magazines to decadence and nostalgia. In 2021 he told NBHAP he wrote it from the vantage point of someone nearing the end of their life. A cover essay in Kaput magazine reads it as an ode to wasted days and the old rock lifestyle and names Smash Hits, Melody Maker and NME; Stereogum hears soft-disco pomp with strobe-like synthesizers.

The title is tied by one account to Curzio Malaparte's novel of the Second World War, while The Believer says he took it from the dispatch without having read the book, so no origin is given here. Garcia, a recent film-school graduate in Los Angeles, mixed live action and stop-motion, with women in spandex, a bespectacled teenager, an oasis and a whale flying with birds; Bejar said it was one hundred percent her doing. Setlist.fm lists the song as the fourth most played of Destroyer's, with 234 performances, behind "Chinatown" and "Times Square" (292 each) and "European Oils" (248). Covers and samples were not found, and the album version is presumed for our upload.