Shortly following the recent release of Alice TM‘s Trigger EP, we get to enjoy a new release from the genre-blending musician. She’s been hard at work on the insanely striking, sharp, and vibrant video for “Stick By You”. It’s a very avant-garde visual, utilizing bright pastel hues, dancers, and clean space to drive the point of the introspective and dynamic track.
Alice TM had quite a bit to say about the work behind the video.
I made it with my friend Catherine Lee (director) who I grew up with, so I’ve known her since we were like 4 years old. And now she is in NY doing film! And the actress Violet O’Neill (whose heart I eat) is an artist in Brooklyn, who I was best friends with in high school, and then we had a dramatic falling out. We were really very cruel to each other, in a way that I know neither of us have ever treated anyone else in our lives. It was a codependent and mutually abusive kind of friendship. But then, after our painful friend breakup, and then a few years apart, we reconciled a couple years ago and we’re working through what had been going on back then. We are both very loving with each other now, and feel so joyful and grateful that we are able to have a friendship again.
I wrote the song about this more recent friend breakup, which is really the second in my life, after Violet. So of course I was thinking about Violet a lot, and she and I started talking about making this video. It’s based on the kind of friendship that is completely absorptive, that takes over your life, that is so involved that you give yourself over to it completely, to the point of losing yourself. And then I took the idea to Catherine, just of these two friends moving through a strange maybe culty party, and the idea of cutting out her heart and eating it, and Catherine ran with it. We shot it in Violet’s painting studio in Bushwick, where she has all these incredible backdrops. Her mom runs the studio and Violet is a painter there, called Oliphant Studios. So we brought in a kiddie pool and a bunch of candy, played with the paint in the studio, used some of their beautiful backdrops, and invited our most patient and forgiving friends and made them dance around and sit in a pool full of paint.
Trigger is available now. Keep up with Alice TM here.
