Sinead O'Connor Releases Video for New Single, "The Wolf Is Getting Married"

Sinead O’Connor is well known for her soulful ballads as well as her colorful personal life and strong religiopolitical beliefs. O’Connor rose to international fame for her reimagining of Prince’s song “Nothing Compares 2 U”, which topped the charts in several countries and earned her multiple Grammy nominations, as well as one win for Best Alternative Music Performance. During her impressive 25 year career in the music industry O’Connor has released eight full studio albums, and her ninth, How About I Be Me (And You Be You) will hit stores on February 21st of this year. Her newest album grapples with many themes familiar to the singer’s past work: love, loss, hope, redemption, and coming into her own, among many others. The New Yorker even goes so far as to call it “Her most romantic record since her pop peak”.

Below is the video for O’Connor’s new single off the album, entitled “The Wolf Is Getting Married”. The piece is directed and composed by London-based band/outfit Breton. The somewhat avant-garde video begins with a figure covered in a gauzy white fabric, its spider-like tentacles extending upwards in a web of strings, attaching somewhere unseen. As the emotional voice of Ms. O’Connor echoes like a choir and seems to fill the space, it becomes clear that the gauze on the figure is, in fact, lace. We soon understand that the figure in the center is actually a bride, held down by waxy strings, who bears a resemblance to a mummy, and vaguely evokes Miss Havisham from Dickens’ Great Expectations. As O’Connor’s lyrics about freedom and marriage reverberate in the background, the strings pull away. They slowly remove elements of the gauzy lace, revealing the bride’s skin: perhaps a metaphor for the process of O’Connor’s own stripping down to her inner self through this expressive album. GQ (UK) is spot on, in more ways than one, in describing the new album as “A work of subtle beauty, a cavalcade of warm strings and textured, intricate song structures that intertwine with the singer’s unmistakable vocals.”