Watch Kimbra’s Surreal, Empowering New Animated “Goldmine” Video
“The process of gold is a fascinating metaphor for pain and suffering,” says singer-songwriter Kimbra, speaking of her trap-inflected ode to self-worth “Goldmine” and its surreal new music video. “Gold must be refined in the fire before it takes on its true character. Much like life itself, we must be tested and refined before we can give from the deepest part of ourselves.”
The song is off the musician’s second full-length, The Golden Echo, which Rolling Stone named one of the 20 Best Pop Albums of 2014, praising the LP for its “hard left turns and buried production treasures.” “Goldmine” was written, Kimbra says, “to be like a mantra to me. . . in order to lift myself in hard times and serve as a reminder that infinite riches lie within me at all times.”
For the music video (which you can view above), the singer sought to create a visual metaphor to symbolize the song’s message of “inner wealth.” Kimbra – who is from New Zealand but recently moved to New York – found that metaphor with the help of filmmakers and fellow Kiwis Chester Travis and Timothy Armstrong, who shot in an old factory in Berlin and employed 100 percent stop-motion animation (no CGI whatsoever), as well as about 400 square yards of heavy-duty aluminum foil and 700 polystyrene spikes, to create the stunning abstract video.
“We hold immense power within us and I love how this is shown in the video through the use of all the different objects that manifest around me and, eventually, through me,” Kimbra enthuses. “I often think about how the world is ultimately all energy and that we are creators of that energy every day.”
The singer will share her own energy live onstage next in August, at Indonesia’s Sunny Side Up Tropical Festival and We the Fest and Singapore’s the Gathering.