Photo Credit: Jonah Freeman

Today, MGMT shared a new single and official music video for their track “Nothing to Declare,” which will appear on the group’s impending studio LP, Loss of Life, due on February 23 via MOM + POP. Joe Frank directed the visual equalizer, that stars Inga Petry, a student at the University of Pittsburgh, where she studies philosophy and pre-law and uses her social media platform to spread awareness on behalf of the disabled community.

In the video, the camera pans and follows Petry, an individual born with upper limb aplasia, as she explores Paris, eventually arriving at the iconic sculpture of the Venus de Milo at the Louvre. The director, Frank, commented, “When I first saw Inga on TikTok, I imagined her as the star of a foreign film. A certain brand of 1990’s European independent cinema typified by the Dardenne brothers always essentially follows a human navigating through life.”

Inga has been armless all her life, which lends a different kind of vulnerability to the simple narrative of a self-possessed young woman traveling from Pittsburgh to Paris. In real life, Inga puts herself online in a very candid way on TikTok, but the ‘Nothing to Declare’ MGMT music video plays on the aesthetics of independent cinema to allow the audience a different sort of emotional fictive space with Inga as ingenue,” he concluded. 

Petry added, “When I was first approached by Joey to do this project, it was the parallelism in his vision that first drew me in. We listened to ‘Nothing To Declare’ as he took me through the concept of the video and I was met with the juxtaposition of beauty and melancholy. Having grown up with no arms, I have been watched my whole life. In some respects, the Venus de Milo has always felt analogous to my life, and specifically to the character I portray in this film. 

She’s adored, respected, and almost constantly surrounded by people, and yet she stands alone and her past is unknown. There have always been questions surrounding her arms and she has never had to answer or prove her worth. From my perspective, she has nothing to declare. Playing this character that is different, and not just because she doesn’t have arms, but by the way she handles the difference and still feeds on new curiosity was a really beautiful experience,” the video’s main focus said. 

Loss of Life represents the long-awaited follow-up for fans of MGMT, who presented their previous collection, Little Dark Age, in 2018. The 10-track project was produced by Andrew VanWyngarden, Ben Goldwasser, and Patrick Wimberly (Solange, Lil Yachty, Joji). The duo’s collaborator Dave Fridmann (The Flaming Lips, Spoon) mixed the impending set, as he has done with MGMT’s last four records. 

Pre-order Loss of Life. Scroll down to watch the official music video for “Nothing to Declare.”