Swedish singer-songwriter Lykke Li has a brand new video to match the second single from her upcoming album. The visual component to “No Rest for the Wicked” comes just a month ahead of the expected May release of her third album, I Never Learn, and it’s an emotional, dark, moving sequence that fits the deeper tone of the song.
“No Rest for the Wicked” is song that stings of grief and longing, and the video does its best to match. Part of the video shows Li and an unidentified man frolicking through tall fields of grass in the winter, interspersed with scenes of her and the same man slow dancing in the dark. Done in a style meant to convey flashbacks, the video is intimate and almost instantly melancholy. It wraps up with her walking away with bags packed, striking off on her own, while the man in the video hops on board a boat and stares listlessly out into the ocean. It seems like a song about a breakup; about endings that are simultaneously new beginnings, and the memories behind them that won’t seem to go away. In an interview, Li admits that it’s about exactly that: about packing up your things and heading out by yourself when a relationship has run its course, and the emotions that come with those changes.
On a broader scale, Li calls I Never Learn the third installment in a kind of musical trilogy. Saying that the album covers the most intense part of being a woman in her 20’s, Li admits that it may be the last in a series of similarly themed works. I Never Learn follows 2007’s Youth Novels and 2011’s Wounded Rhymes. “No Rest for the Wicked” isn’t the first glimpse we’ve gotten of the album either; Li released “Love Me Like I’m Not Made of Stone” earlier this year. Ready to go for a May release, it looks like we have a lot to look forward to with I Never Learn. Plus, Li is embarking on a worldwide tour, starting in London. Fresh off of starring in Swedish crime film “Tommy,” Li has a lot on her plate, but she seems to be managing it well.
Leave a Comment