Hot on the heels of the May 5 release of her album It’s Always Nice To Be Wanted, Sara Flindt is dropping a gorgeous music video for its title track. It premieres today, May 12, right here at noon:
Previously releasing music under the name ZAAR, the Danish-born, Iceland-based artist has been luring fans with her experimental, avant-garde electronic Scandi-pop. It’s Always Nice To Be Wanted is her first EP released under her own name.
Created with Icelandic visual artist Ágúst Elí, the music video begins in Silkeborg, Denmark, where Sara grew up. “It’s a place that’s written into my body,” Sara tells the Grapevine, “but the video moves through it with the freedom of a spirit. It becomes part of the virtual space of the EP — the space between the subconscious and the surreal.”
The video takes viewers on a floating, dream-like journey through the landscape toward an ethereal floating tree atop a hill while lyrics swirl across the screen.
Sara worked with photographer Magnus Andersen on a visual world in which the sounds on her EP can live. That world is visible on the album’s cover, which Sara describes as depicting landscapes that are important to her, but depicted as she sees them in her mind, rather than how they are seen on a map. At the centre of it all is a mermaid emerging from a lake.
“I’ve always been drawn to the folk story of The Little Mermaid,” Sara explains. “Of course, being from Denmark, it’s a story that we swim in from a pretty early age. The way the story ties together the ideas of traveling between places, never being able to return and the pain that comes with choices resonates. For me, of course, the thought of giving up your voice was always at the centre.”
The album’s graphic designer, Janousch, also leaned into the mermaid iconography, describing the EP’s cover as depicting “mermaid words like kelp slowly hovering on the ground of a lake, familiar to plants on land but a home to fish and other creatures, they would only be seen shortly when they hit the vibrating surface of the water, highly pitched, where they echo for a second until they disappear either in the world beneath or the world above. They shine like light to us who are constantly breathing air and water.”
Sara has been making music from a young age. She moved to Aarhus to study music when she was 18. She then relocated to Iceland in 2019 to study at the FÍH music school in Reykjavík.
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