Photo Credit: Hope Antonellis
Known for their experimental approach toward doom metal and their queer/trans-forward ethos, Boston band SEED delivered a powerhouse of a debut earlier this year with Dun Pageant. The record sees the group — consisting of frontperson Lux Lucidi (he/they), drummer Chelsea Ellsworth (she/her), guitarist Tony Tibbetts (he/him), and bassist Jack Whelan (they/them) — submerging the listener into nearly an hour of heavy atmospheric metal, weaving in elements of classical and queercore to make a sound wholly their own. Through it all, Lucidi’s vocals are a consistently arresting presence, shifting from chilling melodic singing to piercing screams over the course of a single track. With Dun Pageant now out for a couple months, the band has followed up on the record’s release by putting out a video for the powerful single “Seaweed” to mark Lucidi’s birthday.
The video for “Seaweed” overlays footage from both 2019 and 2021 atop each other in a haze of superimposition to create a captivating mood piece accompanying the chilling song. The base visuals for the video, showing Lucidi along a beach, were recorded at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland in 2019, where he and Ellsworth were visiting the latter’s sister. Lucidi mentions getting inspired to film while there “to connect with the roots” of the song’s subject matter: “a killer mermaid that is waiting to lure a man to the water to get her revenge.” That element of patience toward a bloody finish is most felt in these standalone wide shots taken at the Cliffs of Moher, where Tibbetts’ clean guitar chords ring out alongside Lucidi’s haunting vocals, mirroring these sweeping oceanfront views.
But, for Lucidi, “the video seemed like something was missing,” and he knew it needed more than just the footage from Ireland. The result was Lucidi and Ellsworth going to Maudsley Park in Newburyport earlier this year for additional shooting. Beyond the park’s historic background, this location also held a personal connection for Ellsworth as the town she grew up in and for its ties to personal music she recorded there (including in a cave in the park, according to Lucidi). Lucidi felt a strong pull to Maudsley Park’s sense of place as well, citing how its “magical character just seemed to fit perfectly to what we needed” in the video. “I suppose the original footage felt too deliberately separated from our sense of home,” he continues, “without the connection to the contrasting area we came from.”
The resulting effect of this blurred pairing of past and present is a visual progression wedded to the emotional arc of “Seaweed.” As the song’s ethereally doomy structure builds itself up and comes crashing down, the superimpositions and cuts become more opaque, and the similarities between the shots from 2019 and 2021 overlap strikingly. Speaking on their intention for the video’s editing, Lucidi explains, “I wanted the video to have a sort of home video and nostalgia sensation, where the footage seemed like a memory or something easy to grasp as relative to our memories.” By the song’s climax — a thundering collective crash of instruments, vocals, and a barreling howl of noise — the video’s imagery evokes the track’s cathartic release via images of waves crashing, skyward glances, and gnarled tree branches capturing the ways the editing process entangled time.
Watch the video for “Seaweed” and stream SEED’s Dun Pageant via Bandcamp below.