Exclusive Video Premiere: ‘Half Hero,’ Oh Land

ABOVE: NANNA FABRICIUS (OH LAND). 

Prior to the release of her debut album in 2008, Nanna Fabricius was a relatively unknown woman. After dropping Fauna under the stage name Oh Land, however, things rapidly changed. The artist, who was raised on the outskirts of Copenhagen alongside rabbits, turtles, cats, pigs, birds, and chickens, has since become a household name with an established reputation for well crafted, electro-pop songs, often accompanied by visually stunning and artistically powerful videos. Unlike the geometric digital rendering, abundance of glitter, and dancing in tribal costumes on the edge of a waterfall in her video for “White Nights,” this particular video for “Half Hero,” which is exclusively streaming below, strips the song to its bare minimum.

“The whole idea was that I wanted to do live, one take videos so that you can get as close to the music in its cleanest form as possible,” Fabricius tells us. “We only did three takes of [the] song, so there was a lot of improvisation.”

Recording live in a bathroom was not the original plan, but when she saw the toilets in a row without doors, the intended setting of a large, open art space was left behind. “At first the crew thought I was joking, but really quickly everyone was super stoked about the idea. It was fun to see my bandmates play like that, and everyone knows that vocals sound amazing in a bathroom,” she adds with a laugh.

Opening with Fabricuis sitting in the handicap stall with her microphone and synth machine, the camera then seamlessly moves down the row of stalls, showing her guitarist in the middle, the neck of the guitar protruding outward, and keyboardist crammed next door, with his keyboard diagonally situated. Cords run amuck, intermixed with toilet paper that provides a unifying element between each of the three musicians.

“The only sentence in the song that has anything to do with toilets is ‘leave me alone!’—a toilet is a private space—and that’s why it was really funny to make it a public and social space,” Fabricius continues. “I think the absurdity of the setting makes the song stand out in a new and unexpected way.”

THIS VIDEO WAS MADE IN COLLABORATION WITH SWATCH AND PLEDGEMUSIC, THROUGH WHICH OH LAND CROWDFUNDED HER LATEST ALBUM, EARTH SICK. FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE ARTIST, VISIT HER WEBSITE.