Thao & The Get Down Stay Down Unveil ‘Phenom’ Video

Thao & the Get Down Stay Down shared the video for their new single “Phenom.” The song will appear on Thao Nguyen and company’s forthcoming album, Temple, due out on May 15 via Ribbon Music.

The visual for “Phenom” came together without any of the collaborators ever being in the same space together. Erin Murray and Jeremy Schaulin-Rioux teamed up to co-direct the clip. Murray has worked on videos for such luminaries as Ed Sheeran and John Legend. She also did all the choreography for the “Phenom” video as well as previous single “Temple.”

“I had fun adapting many of the original video ideas into the Zoom space,” Murray said in a statement, “an outlet that was totally new to me in a storytelling/choreographic sense.”

“It speaks to the power of Thao to channel the rage and beauty of this song,” Schaulin-Rioux added, “turning isolation into community in a way that’s unique to this scary moment and also universal to a fucked up world.”

Thao herself also detailed “Phenom” in a statement. Read it below:

“Phenom” is a direct descendant of the song “Meticulous Bird” from my previous album, A Man Alive. I wrote it late last year. I was reading Octavia Butler and Ursula Le Guin and channeling other worlds, a sort of post-apocalyptic utopia wherein time collapses and generations of the true leaders and the scorched of the earth come back and rule, wherein the earth itself comes back and brings to bear. I was and am always in deep awe of the fierce and focused throughout history who have worked and organized at the front lines, calling bullshit and protecting vulnerable life. They are the real phenoms and we are strong from their strength. The first seed of this song was that guitar riff that is layered over and over again at the end. ‘Phenom’ is at the edge of mania with the miscarriage of truth and justice and power, but believes in a more virtuous time and place in the distance.”

Watch the video for “Phenom” below: