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After Maya Yenn’s sophomore single, How Much Sadness Can You Swallow? dazzled listeners with its drama and sumptuousness, the artist has followed up with an appropriately cinematic music video that took months of work to create.
The video follows the story of a woman hell-bent on ending an alien invasion as she sprints through the English countryside towards a crash-site where something strange has fallen to earth. Struggling to resist an onslaught of psionic weaponry as her reality is distorted and her memory is eroded, she eventually makes it to a mysterious diamond that has appeared on the horizon.
Shot right across the UK, from the rural plains of Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Cheshire to the striking dunes of Formby beach in Liverpool. It's the second self-directed music video Yenn has released following the tiptoe music video, and pays homage to the artist’s love of contemporary horror and sci-fi cinema.
“Allegorical horror and sci-fi are big influences for me so I really wanted to pay tribute to that. If you’ve seen films like Melancholia (2011), Arrival (2017), Annihilation (2018) and Midsommar (2019) you’ll probably spot the references to each one in the music video.”
How Much Sadness Can You Swallow? was originally written in response to a nightmare Yenn had of a “vision of hell”
In the video, Yenn can be seen in a striking all-white outfit reminiscent of fencing garb, her appearance is otherworldly, resembling a sort of deadly astronaut as she sprints through the English countryside, fields and sand dunes, sword in hand, towards a strange, luminous diamond that has appeared on the horizon. The story was written by Yenn herself.
“I knew I didn’t want to just retell the story told in the song, but I did want it to have the same energy and sense of threat and then the idea for the music video came really quickly, almost a fever dream. I had this image of a woman with a sword trying to fight an alien invasion where the aliens have some kind of psionic powers and can distort your reality or wipe your memories.”
The second self-directed music video Yenn has released pays homage to the artist’s love of contemporary horror and sci-fi cinema.
The intensity certainly matches the melodrama of the song as How Much Sadness Can You Swallow? was originally written in response to a nightmare Yenn had of a “vision of hell” where she found herself trapped in an old house living the same day over and over again, her memories wiped overnight.
While Yenn and Langley set out to shoot the video in June 2021, they did not wrap up filming until September and the extensive visual effects work then didn’t conclude until February 2022 when colourist, Chris Frankland was finally able to grade the video. It's an ambitious feat that a three person team has pulled off with almost no budget, which no doubt added to the extended production time, but Yenn was determined to get the video right.
“There’s something so beautiful about the sci-fi genre. It has this uncanny ability to pull our own humanity into sharp focus in this icy, delicate way like no other genre can. I really wanted to get that right with the video so even though it took some time I can only hope it’s worth the wait.”
“There’s something so beautiful about the sci-fi genre. It has this uncanny ability to pull our own humanity into sharp focus in this icy, delicate way like no other genre can.” Yenn said
EDIT: The How Much Sadness Can You Swallow? Music Video was awarded BEST MUSIC VIDEO at the British Independent Film Festival 2022
Official music video credits:
Written and directed by: Maya Yenn
Cinematography, VFX and editing by: James Langley
Graded by: Chris Frankland
Watch the official music video here.
For immediate release
How Much Sadness Can You Swallow? is available to stream/download on all platforms.