Pixx's inventive videos are always well worth a watch. For recent synth-pop jam “Grip” the British singer defied gravity, and “Baboo” gave a tough edge to the Super 8 style. Her creativity skews to the leftfield, but her performances are given lightness by her melodious and purposeful singing voice.
Her new release is the punchy synth track “I Bow Down” — the lead single from her debut 4AD album The Age of Anxiety — and has the strangest video I’ve seen in a while. Pix appears hairless and covered in clay or fluro paints, singing alongside moulded head casts of herself. One of these is covered in in colorful string, which she pulls like a puppeteer. In other shots she contorts her neck in a way that reminds me of the mind-bending visual for Björk’s 1997 classic “Hunter."
"I’d been experimenting with head casts for a while with [make-up artist] Natasha Lawes for a while,” Pixx explained to The FADER over email. "We liked the idea of a constantly changing identity; that was the root concept of the video. The video shows me in different forms of myself — it represents the different states of mind I was in during the writing process for my album, and let me engage with a persona that I have never accessed before.”
Watch the video above. 4AD will release The Age of Anxiety on June 2.