Lauren Ruth Ward Haunts on Passionate Visual for ‘Mindseye’ and Announces 2023 European Tour

Upon each release, Lauren Ruth Ward demonstrates different aspects of their artistry and identifiable connections to an audience through empathetic storytelling; heard delicately on their emotionally unveiled EP, Mindseye.

Today, the Los Angeles-based artist shares the video for the title-track and illustrates how crowded our beds can be as we move on from the loss of a relationship.

Directed by Dri Sommer and Nicol Biesek, the video follows Ward as a lingering corpse trapped in their ex-girlfriend’s house. Featuring Netflix’s First Kill star, Sarah Catherine Hook, as the woman haunted by Ward, the video personifies the innumerable emotions carried throughout the mourning process of a loss. It doesn’t mock or discredit death, but pushes the emotional misery comparable to a person leaving the physical realm to an unwavering fact of time that we will all share this pain.

At first, Ward appears misguided, applying make-up with no real comprehension of reality. Shots of their ex-lover moving on catch Ward’s eye and through montage shots of affection, we see similar moves repeated in exchange for another. Tempo changes and distressed guitar licks are the basis of the track, with a signature vibrato thrown in the throes of jealousy, and shift each scene beautifully.

Invisibility, envy and ultimately infliction of confusion tear at Ward. There’s a moment where you’d like this character to have another chance, attempt a feat of magic for them, but at the same time, wish for Hook’s character to also find peace.

The video makes a point to connect with both individuals with an emphasis on Ward’s seemingly impossible attempt at closure through this character. Hook becomes shaken with cold touches, shadows that aren’t there, continuing to feed into the narrative of the track to distinguish what is and isn’t real. Which becomes hard on screen as the chemistry between Hook and Ward is effortless and reads as real as past lovers.

“When we originally heard ‘Mindseye,’ we immediately felt that the song called for a visual narrative journey  — we knew that the lyrics as well as the tempo changes would be so fun to create a story around,” says  Sommer. “What we didn’t know is that Lauren had just worked on a short film with an incredible makeup artist that had inspired her to want to play a corpse character that looked…sexy. That’s how the Hot Corpse was born. We began brainstorming as a team and decided the corpse would be stuck in her ex-girlfriend’s  house watching her move on to a new partner.”

Adds Biesek, “Because the song is about the loss of relationship, we wanted to show a wide range of emotions: from longing to jealousy and grief as somebody moves on. We wanted the audience to sit with the corpse’s loss and nostalgia without it feeling morbid.”

Showing that we each carry a piece of one another through time and different spaces, the true closure comes from the allowance of time to mourn and of acceptance. The video relays this message and is a perfect representation of the track — strikingly beautiful regarding time and loss.

---

TOUR DATES 

Tickets available HERE

01/04: Savona, IT – Raindogs House 

02/04: Bologna, IT – Freakout Club

---

Connect with the artist:

Instagram | TikTok | YouTube | Spotify

---