Rina Sawayama drops cinematic new video for 'Bad Friend' | NME
Rina Sawayama has released a powerful new music video for her latest single ‘Bad Friend’.
‘Bad Friend’ is the fifth single taken from her debut album ‘SAWAYAMA’, following ‘STFU!’, ‘Comme Des Garçons (Like The Boys)’, ‘XS’ and ‘Chosen Family’.
The video for ‘Bad Friend’ was shot before the coronavirus lockdown and directed by longtime collaborator Ali Kurr, who also helmed the videos for ‘STFU!’ and ‘XS’. Sawayama stars in the clip as a stressed-out businessman drowning his sorrows in alcohol at a bar – to regrettable results.
Watch it below:
“We had so much fun making this, as it was my first time doing stunts and being in prosthetic makeup,” Sawayama said of the video in a press statement.
“The song is about the heartbreak of losing a friendship and realising that you were the cause of the breakdown. When you hear the song this is not the video you imagine – but that’s exactly what we wanted. The music video is a reimagining of the themes in ‘Bad Friend’; of longing, loss, self hate and ultimately self love.
“Choosing a slow, film noir style focuses all the attention on performance and acting, which was definitely very daunting but I had so much fun making a video that is so wildly different from my previous videos.”
- Read More: Rina Sawayama – ‘SAWAYAMA’ review: deeply personal self-portrait lays waste to genre constraints
‘SAWAYAMA’ was released earlier this year, and NME gave it five stars, calling it “an honest, genre-exploding self-portrait”.
NME‘s Hannah Mylrea wrote: “Drawing on every aspect of her identity, Sawayama creates an expansive musical account of her personal history, all bolstered by her impressive experimental song-writing techniques. And on top of that, she’s somehow managed to make nu-metal sound effortlessly cool.”
