By: Josh Kitchen / April 15, 2024
A lot can happen in five years. Back in the year 2019, things were pretty bad, but little did we know just how bad it could get. That year, when Natalie Mering released her now classic fourth album, Titanic Rising under her moniker Weyes Blood, the United Nations reported that there were, “only eleven years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.” Five years later, it feels like we’re even worse off. This is what so much of Titanic Rising touches on, and it’s proven to be a timeless statement and mourning for the one home humanity's got.
On “Five Years” from David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, he similarly sang about the end of all things. “We had five years left to cry in/News guy wept and told us/Earth was really dying. On the fifth anniversary of Titanic Rising, perhaps it’s no accident Weyes Blood decided to release the long-shelved music video for the album’s second single, "Andromeda," a track about traveling the cosmos searching for meaning and connection in a dying world.
In the video, directed by Mering, and frequent collaborators Ambar Navarro and Colton Stock. Mering does her own version of Bowie's “Starman” and plays both astronaut and alien, even riding an asteroid dressed in a Barbaralla-esque metallic suit as she’s headed on a path to psychedelic destruction.
Most of Andromeda was shot in 2018 prior to Titanic Rising's release. All of the shots that take place in space were done in 2024, Stock tells me. In the Youtube chat for the premiere of the video, Mering joked “the video got caught in purgatory between life and death.” In addition to co-directing, Stock also edited the video and created the visual effects for the space sequences. “Once I proposed the idea of capturing more space footage to Natalie, we moved into production on that immediately with Ambar [Navarro].”
The video draws from classic 50s, 60s, and 70s film and sci-fi like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove. “Dr. Strangelove for when Natalie is riding the asteroid,” Stock muses.
The video is cinematic in scope, delivering on Mering’s treatise on another beloved Titanic Rising track, “Movies.” “Those Kubrick references were at the top of my mind. My goal with the edit was to truly make this feel like a film more than anything,” Stock says.
As for what comes next from Weyes Blood, in the aforementioned Youtube chat, she says she’s, “working on her next big era” and that it’s “all about redemption.” To borrow a phrase from Paul Schrader's psychologically climate-change inspired First Reformed, let's hope that God forgives us and we don’t have to wait five years for what comes next.
Watch Andromeda below: