Weyes Blood - A Given Thing

JUL 01 2024 · 12:00

Weyes Blood - A Given Thing (2024) Director: Joey Frank Era: Post-Pandemic Indie Art-Folk Revival (2022–2024) - Intimate, low-budget psychedelic portraiture aligned with the introspective cultural turn following global upheaval, rooted in the analog warmth of 1970s singer-songwriter aesthetics. High curatorial value as a rare example of a major-label-adjacent artist releasing a deliberately intimate, low-production-value video for a critically celebrated album track over a year post-release. Documents the intersection of visual art practice (Joey Frank's gallery and film background) with indie music video direction, and preserves a specific moment of Brooklyn DIY psychedelic portraiture culture. The quantitative metrics, slow pace, warm tones, low motion, form a coherent and historically legible aesthetic signature. Context: Released in early 2024 as an unannounced visual supplement to the closing track of Weyes Blood's critically acclaimed 2022 album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow (Sub Pop), this video arrived over a year after the album's debut with no promotional campaign. The spontaneous, apartment-based production, shot in Red Hook, Brooklyn, embodies a countercultural rejection of high-budget music video spectacle, instead privileging intimacy, warmth, and psychedelic interiority. It sits within a broader early-2020s wave of indie-folk artists embracing lo-fi, domestic visual language as both aesthetic and ideological statement, reflecting themes of connection, isolation, and cosmic love that pervade Weyes Blood's thematic universe. Director notes: The video for 'A Given Thing' was shot in a small apartment in Red Hook, New York, described in promotional materials as a spontaneous, intimate portrait video made with 'a bunch of strange kids and old friends,' resulting in what was characterized as a psychedelic piece of rumination. The video was released in early 2024 as a belated visual companion to the track, which originally appeared on Weyes Blood's November 2022 album And In The Darkness, Hearts Aglow (Sub Pop). The delayed release, over a year after the album's debut, attracted notice for its quiet, unannounced drop. The production's quantitative profile (low motion, slow cuts, warm tones, high saturation) is entirely consistent with a low-budget, single-location intimate shoot, aligning with Frank's broader artistic practice of eclectic, psychedelic, and conceptually driven visual work.