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Oct 07, 2021 By Mark Redfern

Marissa Nadler is releasing a new album, The Path of the Clouds, on October 29 via Sacred Bones and Bella Union. Now she has shared its third single, “Couldn’t Have Done the Killing,” via an atmospheric film noir/true crime styled video for the song. Tyler Derryberry and Christen Dute directed the video, which features lots of quick cuts of crime, with faces rarely seen. A press release says the video pays homage to TV series such as Unsolved Mysteries and In Search of… Watch it below.

Derryberry and Dute collectively had this to say about the video in a press release: “When Marissa came to us to make a video for a song on her new album, we were already aware of the album’s themes and her inspirations. While she was writing and recording the album sequestered at home during the pandemic, we stayed in touch, sharing our media diet of true crime and the paranormal. We exchanged links to podcasts about Skinwalkers, recommended our favorite serial killer documentaries, and discussed our favorite theories about DB Cooper.

“We set out to recreate that moment in time when murders and bank robberies shared an equal plausibility with hauntings and high strangeness. Remember when innocently entertaining a conspiracy theory or two seemed to have no cultural or political consequences? When Coast to Coast AM would have us believing the government was hiding a UFO in a hangar somewhere, but no one was going to storm the capital over it?

“The settings of Massachusetts and Maine appropriately enhanced the New England vibe of our and Marissa’s tone. Cabins older than the Great Depression and cemeteries older than the Revolutionary War are everywhere. Apartment buildings where college students still live today were the scenes of murders fifty years ago. Everybody seems to own an ax. We even did some shooting in Cumberland County, Maine, where Stephen King’s fictional town of Salem’s Lot is located. Turn on the camera, point it at the dark, and the witchiness just seems to seep in on its own.”

Nadler has also announced that she will perform an album release show in New York City at Le Poisson Rouge on November 14th.

Previously Nadler shared the album’s first single, “Bessie, Did You Make It?,” via a video for it. “Bessie, Did You Make It?” was one of our Songs of the Week. Then she shared its second single, “If I Could Breathe Underwater,” via a video for the song that fittingly featured Nadler underwater. The song features harp playing from Mary Lattimore, a longtime friend of Nadler’s. “If I Could Breathe Underwater” also made an appearance on our Songs of the Week list.

Nadler wrote and recorded the album during the pandemic and was partially inspired by binging reruns of Unsolved Mysteries as she “began to notice parallels between many of its stories and her own life,” as a press release puts it. On The Path of the Clouds she worked with various collaborators, including Mary Lattimore, Simon Raymonde (of Cocteau Twins and Lost Horizons and the head of Bella Union), multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess, Jesse Chandler (Nadler’s piano teacher and a member of Mercury Rev and Midlake), Emma Ruth Rundle, and Black Mountain’s Amber Webber. Seth Manchester (Lingua Ignota, Battles, and Lightning Bolt) mixed the album.

Nadler’s last album was 2018’s For My Crimes.

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