Santigold Contemplates Invisibility on New Single “Nothing”

The second sample from the recently announced LP Spirituals comes with a visual teaser.

Santigold Contemplates Invisibility on New Single “Nothing”

The second sample from the recently announced LP Spirituals comes with a visual teaser.

Words: Mike LeSuer

Photo: Frank Ockenfels

July 13, 2022

Around this time last month, Santigold announced her return with plans to release an album called Spirituals on September 9. That news arrived with the ode to perseverance “Ain’t Ready,” which she’s following up today with another new single called “Nothing” which replicates that uneasy electronic sound palette for a meditation on feeling invisible.

“It’s a song for anyone who has not been seen, and for me it was an opportunity to explore how that feels,” she shared in a press statement. “I wrote ‘Nothing’ in the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests, and in writing the lyrics I was able to release a heaviness that I did not know I was carrying. Being Black and being a woman, particularly one who has chosen the creative path that I have chosen, I have always felt invisible to a degree. People see only what they think they know, or what they think I should be. Or sometimes, they see nothing at all. This song is about the burden of existing beneath a veil of nothingness. And the strength it requires just to be, despite it.”

Along with the song, Santigold is sharing a visual teaser for the track—a minute-long condensed version of the single paired with a visual of the artist donning an eerie plague-doctor beak. “I loved the idea of a being that is woman but also beyond human in some way, and even unclassifiable,” she added of the clip. “A being for whom there is no name, no category, who is totally unique, and fierce. I wanted to become this type of creature in this video because I don’t believe we have to know how to name or define what we’re seeing to accept that it exists, that it’s beautiful and powerful and worthy of being exactly what it is.”

Check out the song and visual below.