VIDEO: Nite Jewel Releases New Video 'Before I Go'

Nite Jewel today shares a video for the song "Before I Go," off of her critically acclaimed avant-electronic pop album No Sun. Filmed by Dicky Bahto, "Before I Go" music video captures the timeless self-possession of walking through a city alone in rich, black and white Super 8mm. These snapshots are simple rituals of solitude.

The video grounds the song-which swells with grief-in tiny moments of quotidian pleasure and urban life. While loss feels huge and and sometimes unbearably spacious, it is still mapped onto the mundanity of how we live day to day. This tactile medium complements Gonzalez' approach to electropop-which pulls from traditions both ancient and contemporary.

Born out of personal loss, the tradition of lament, and a Moog sequencer, Nite Jewel's No Sun is a feat of unguarded electronic music. The album is grounded in Gonzalez's electronic oeuvre and academic research, but is also a sonic expulsion of pain.

In 2018, Gonzalez's twelve year marriage dissolved. This left her alone and displaced, drifting from friend's couch to friend's couch. At the same time, she began her PhD in Musicology at UCLA. Gonzalez's research on women's musical lament practices formed a historical backbone for what became No Sun. Dating back to ancient Greece, the lament has utilized female voices as a vehicle for expressing communal and personal grief.

In her research, Gonzalez considers this tradition within the context of contemporary pop divas, asking the question "What does it mean to be a professional mourner?" or to be a woman hired as an emotional vessel for a historically male composer? Gonzalez's research considers the creative power of such singers, arguing that while often seen as visceral performers alone, these women are agents in their own right.

No Sun questions and remodels the archetype of female pain. The album follows the tradition of a woman's voice in lament, but Gonzalez's role as an auteur producer complicates the stereotype of a female voice as a mere repository for suffering.

No Sun could be interpreted as electronic dance music for an era of death, mourning, but also a fervent celebration of life. In her instrumentation-which oscillates from sparse synths to dizzying experimental soundscapes-she reforms the lament into something hypermodern. No Sun is stacked on top of a genre bending (and defining) career in which Gonzalez' innovative songwriting has been the focal point.

In No Sun, Gonzalez honors a tradition of mourners whose voices were overlooked as mere tools, by allowing the ethereal power of her voice to float to the forefront of her sonic world.

Watch the new music video here:

NITE JEWEL TOUR DATES

5/25 Los Angeles, CA - Resident

6/14 Lisbon, PT - Galleria ZDB

6/15 Braga, PT - Gnration

6/16 Berlin, DE - Volksbühne

6/17 Jena, DE - TRAFO

6/21 London, UK - Moth Club

6/22 Oxted, UK - United Reformed Church

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