Video premiere: Annie Hardy, ‘Saves’

Kevin Bronson on February 24th, 2020

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The new Annie Hardy video is not for the squeamish.

The intense video for “Saves” (the title track to Hardy’s new EP) features the 38-year-old singer-songwriter nude in the bathtub — “more Manson naked than Britney naked,” she says — appearing as if she’s the victim of some ritualistic torture, bloody and bruised. The wounds, she says, are all real. And those are only the ones you can see.

Hardy, who came into the spotlight in the mid-Aughts with her grunge-shoegaze project Giant Drag, has taken some of life’s most vicious punches and lived to sing about it. Her heavy 2017 solo album “Rules” laid bare the damage done by an almost unimaginable series of tragedies: Her infant son died of SIDS 17 days after he was born in 2015, and the baby’s father Robert Paulson, aka the rapper Cadalack Ron, died of a drug overdose nine months later. A few months after the release of “Rules,” longtime friend Alvin DeGuzman, bassist for the Icarus Line, succumbed to cancer. Even her cat died.

In stream-of-consciousness fashion, the new EP tries to sort through it all, at times in a disconcerting, meandering way (“Freedom”) and at others with an almost clinical directness (“Dream” — “I wanna know / why I didn’t die.”) The songs, she says, “were all delivered as if by a divine fax machine.” The EP was produced by Collin Deatherage (of The War Toys) — who is also Hardy’s new collaborator in Giant Drag.

Hardy announced the resurrection of Giant Drag late last year, and she and Deatherage, who did a 14-date European tour starting in January, are working on a new GD album.

For now, there is this new episode of bloodletting, an addendum to “Rules” that the songwriter calls a cautionary tale of the hazards of self-sacrifice and the thankless job of caring in a world where narcissism reigns. The title track, with its sampled lecture from clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, accentuates the theme.

Watch with self-care.

||| Watch: The video for “Saves”