Awww. Poor Annie Clark. The Brooklyn singer-songwriter known as St. Vincent is abducted, abused, and buried alive in her new video for the aptly-titled “Cruel,”from her powerful third album Strange Mercy (out September 13). Watch below!
In the clip, Clark is snatched from a gas station, thrown in the trunk of a car by a lonely father and his mother-less young son and daughter, then forced to cook, clean, sew, ballroom dance, and perform other housewife-esque tasks by the ungrateful and downright cruel family of three. She’s finally dunked in a bathtub, tied to a chair, then thrown in a deep grave in their backyard — as the daughter shovels dirt over her.
Clark describes the video shoot for Huffington Post: “The cast and crew and I shot three grueling days in a row at locations both north and south of San Francisco,” she writes. The mansion scenes were shot on Mare Island, “a mostly abandoned naval base just north of Oakland,” she says, while the opening abduction scene was shot at a local gas station.
The starring role came, um, naturally to Clark: “It didn’t take much method acting to honestly react to, well, having a sack thrown over my head and my body thrown into the trunk of a car.”
The grave scene was constructed in the studios of Ian Kibbey and Corey Creasey, the direction duo know as Terri Timely. “Set design did a brilliant job building a ‘grave,'” says Clark. “This consisted of three 20-foot tall flats covered in cow manure, ammonia, dirt, sand, tree limbs, which I was lowered into via forklift.”
“I think I still have some of this grave dirt in my shoes.”
St. Vincent is hitting the road on a U.S. tour behind Strange Mercy this September — see dates here. Read SPIN’s cover story from our September Style Issue here.
WATCH: St. Vincent, “Cruel”
