Boston singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler has shared a new video for “All the Colors of the Dark,” and like much of Nadler’s music, it’s both eerie and enchanting. The song is the second peek at Nadler’s forthcoming seventh album, Strangers, following “Janie in Love.”
Shot in moody grayscale, the stop-motion clip features furniture, objects, and plant life moving and growing with wills of their own. The low sample rate of the stop-action sequences gives the whole production a fidgety, handmade feel. Nadler appears too, opening and closing curtains and generally seeming unconcerned that her apartment is redecorating itself around her.
In a press release, Nadler named inspirations including filmmaker Jan Švankmejer, photographer Francesca Woodman, and animation team the Brothers Quay. Of the video, she said:
In the video, everyday objects move on their own, representing a lingering presence in my life. In both the song and video that shadowing presence could be interpreted as a memory or as a true apparition, and I’ll leave it up to interpretation. Little by little, throughout the course of the song and video, the leaves and vines are pushed back into the drawers as time slowly creeps by. I rearrange the photos on the wall that have inexplicably moved, and among other things, shut the windows and blinds that keep opening by themselves. With each spin of the trees, seasons pass, and I pace around the house. With the death of the figure at the end of the video, that presence is vaporized.
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Strangers is out May 20 from Sacred Bones. Watch “All of the Colors of the Dark” below.
