Meg Myers knew there was no better time for a video about feeling stuck in a rut than a Monday. Thus, the alternative rock artist debuted a riveting visual for her song “Numb,” the lead single from her upcoming album Take Me To The Disco, today (May 21).
Myers sports a blunt bob haircut and suit, encased by her cubicle and later smothered by her colleagues as they lay hands on her and intrude her personal space. What viewers see is how Myers felt about her record company, which she claimed “was looking for something out of me that just didn’t feel right for many reasons.”
The video confronts the 31-year-old artist’s frustration head-on, and does so in a way that passes the baton of her burden to the viewer. “I wanted the video to make the viewer experience this uncomfortable feeling,” she said in a statement. The visceral feature cuts to different spaces – her office, her home, even a mountain – that seem to cut Myers off from living her own life and rather controls everything she does.
Having her hair tucked behind her ear by a man, Myers petitions in the first verse, “Tell me how to fight this war.” According to the video’s director Clara Aronavich, Myers’ need to breathe mimics the plea of women everywhere: “In ‘Numb,’ I interpret Meg’s sentiment as one of desperate pleading for space, for room to exist quietly and at her own pace in a culture that insists on so much of her and for her as a female.”
“Numb” in itself proves cathartic, but paired with its video component, the song’s essence appears to be didactic. Aronavich pulls from “Kontakthof,” a dance piece by Pina Bausch in which a woman is continually touched by men in suits: “So I decided to write an homage narrative that expands from Bausch’s conceit but that turns away from a purely gender-based backbone to a broader, societal one.”
Check out “Numb” below.