Mitski | still from video
Mitski’s new video for “A Pearl” disorients and delights
Mitski | still from video
Mitski‘s new music video for “A Pearl,” produced in collaboration with Spotify and Art Camp, is a swirling landscape in which the floor is literally pulled out from underneath you.
The video is made of over 1,400 individually painted frames that feature of a girl walking while the scene around her twists, turns, and flips upside down. It’s a dizzying experience as the figure runs through empty planes, a house coming to life, and even jumps off an unseen cliff into a choppy ocean. The guitar solo bursts in and the girl goes into free fall as objects from the house — chairs, napkins, flower vases– fall around her.
As far as music videos go, Mitski finds a middle ground between direct representation and abstraction. You can easily “get” that something is falling apart, but the questions of “what, where, and how” are left purposefully unanswered. Throughout the video, Mitski’s haunting lyric, “I fell in love with a war,” manages to sew together these chaotic images. The video feels like a kind of pastel-painted war, one where instability and repetition reign and all you can do is try to outrun the world crumbling around you.
Watch the video below.