Vivian Girls Share “Sludge” Video, Directed by Alex Ross Perry

Beloved garage-pop trio Vivian Girls are releasing their first new album in eight years, Memory, on Sept. 20. Today (Sept. 10), they’ve shared a video for the album’s third single, “Sludge,” an appropriately sludgy track following “Something to Do” and “Sick.”

Cassie Ramone, Katy Goodman and Ali Koehler amble around The Valley in the nostalgic, lo-fi video, which was directed by Alex Ross Perry, whose 2018 drama Her Smell starred Elisabeth Moss as a self-destructive rock star. In a statement, Perry shared how the Vivian Girls influenced his film, as well as the thought process behind the Californian aesthetic of “Sludge”:

I just counted: there are four different photos of Vivian Girls in the look book I made for Her Smell.

So if you had told me when I was first seeing them at Death By Audio (or was it Union Pool?) in 2008 (or was it late 2007?) that over a decade later, we’d be collaborating on a music video, I would have been alarmed at the specificity of this prophecy.

The notion was to invent a video for ‘Sludge’ that honored The Valley, toying with suburban nothingness and alienation, honoring filming locations from E.T. that are still emanating traces of decades-old magic.

To explore the dichotomy of light and dark, mortal and immortal, self and self. Of then and now…

Watch “Sludge” below, plus a 2009 Vivian Girls performance from the Paste archives.