Iron & Wine - Bitter Truth

What this video is

Released February–March 2018 as a promotional video for 'Bitter Truth' from Iron & Wine's sixth studio album Beast Epic (Sub Pop, August 2017), a Grammy-nominated record widely received as a return to Sam Beam's stripped-down acoustic roots. The video participates in a broader mid-2010s cultural moment in which indie folk artists — many associated with the Sub Pop and Secretly Canadian rosters — explored nostalgia,…

Why it matters

Exemplifies the visual grammar of the late-2010s indie folk music video: slow-burn, single-location, narrative-driven, and deliberately low-spectacle. The video's use of an adolescent school dance as a metaphor for adult romantic disillusionment is a sophisticated deployment of ironic innocence, a…

The director

Hannah Welever is a Chicago-based director and cinematographer with a BA in cinematography from Columbia College Chicago. She owns and operates Good Trouble Films, a boutique production company. Her credits span music videos, branded content, short films,…