Mitski’s fourth studio album, Puberty 2, is less than a month away (due out June 17 on Dead Oceans), and singles “Your Best American Girl” and “Happy” promise a powerful album with kicked up pop aesthetics to match Mitski’s ever-incisive songwriting.
Today she released the Maegan Houang-directed video for “Happy,” which follows a pretty non-traditional concept of Houang’s own design, playing into the single’s theme of the exhaustingly cyclical and fleeting nature of hapiness.
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Inspired by the work of Douglas Sirk and Wong Kar Wai, the video follows a 1950s Asian-American housewife as she’s worn down by her husband’s infidelities—often with beautiful, idealized white women—over the course of several years, evenutally resigning herself to inadequacy and the disappointment of promises broken ad infinitum.
Soon enough, however, she discovers that her husband’s penchant for blonde-haired, blue-eyed types is something much darker. There’s a lot going on. The video for “Happy” is anything but, but it’s also a refreshingly clever and subversive piece of feminist filmmaking that rewards multiple viewings.
“I wanted to explore the impact other people’s actions—from affairs to murdering other people—have on the ones closest to them, as we still live in a very solipsistic society,” Houang says of inspiration for the video.
Watch Mitski’s video for “Happy” below (heads up, there is some pretty graphic violence).
