Anna Mieke has unveiled the illuminating visuals for her new single 'Mannequin', with the beautifully-shot video directed and choreographed by Anna Heisterkamp.

Having premiered on Brooklyn Vegan today, 'Mannequin' acts as the third cut from the Wicklow native's forthcoming album, Theatre, which lands on November 18th. The musician's debut album Idle Mind was released on April 26th, 2019.

"Mannequin” was lyrically inspired in part by a Jane Kenyon poem, 'Otherwise'," Mieke explains. "The first line of the song is one that repeats in the poem. There’s a feeling of being an observer, a witness, of being observed in performance, a play, and the rituals of moving through life. An acknowledgement of things coming to an end, and how nothing is meant to stay the same. A kind of imagined underworld exists in this song, too: it lives in a hot climate and I imagine a jungle, desert, tropical birds when I hear it. There’s a sort of darkness present: porcelain eyes, staring; blood; being consumed; a gun,” she explains.

“I’d barely finished writing the song and hadn't practiced it a whole lot when we recorded it, and Matt and Ryan, who play on the live core take, had barely heard it before, so there’s a sort of tension there—a hanging on to an edge. One reference I had for the arrangement of this song was the music composed for 'Peter And The Wolf' by Sergei Prokofiev.”

Of the video, Heisterkamp adds: "It’s an assemblage of how it felt to listen to this song over and over with different lines standing out each time, and how it feels to move to a song someone has described to you before you listen to it properly. I wanted to look at the stark contrast between nothing and something slight, the feeling of falling and watching someone fall, distortion of the natural."

Following previous single 'For A Time', 'Mannequin' features movements in the video from Carolyn Ingram, Niamh Bury, Cameron Lynch, Gavin Fahy, Róisín Hackett, Neil Reilly, Brían Mac Gloinn, Jacky O' Halloran, Finn Carragher McDonald, Vanessa Nunan, Aoife Smith, Anna Mieke, Kate Gurren and Camilla Houstoun.

Theatre envelopes listeners in the warmth of Anna Mieke’s world, radiating with an intense heat that lies closer to the desert or the jungle than her hometown of Wicklow. It’s the surreal soundtrack of a vast personal plain steeped in nostalgia, family, memory, death and dreaming — where gritty reality and romanticism meet.

“Perhaps the music enables some form of dreamlike movement towards an imaginary place,” Anna Mieke says. “I’m just creating a sound world to escape to, built from moments in time. I hope it reminds someone else of their own experience...memories of youth infused with an intense warmth, like that childhood sensation of summer.”

With influences ranging from Talking Heads and The Mamas & The Papas to Orchestre Baobab, Nusrat Ali Khan, West African kora and traditional Brazilian dance; the album’s vivid soundscapes mirror Anna Mieke’s lush and adventurous upbringing. Theatre will surely bring alt-folk sensation Anna Mieke to wider audiences.

Theatre is now available for pre-order here.

Check out the video for 'Mannequin' below.