MGMT – “Nothing To Declare”
MGMT, who’ve pulled off the impressive feat of being deeply beloved by millennials and Gen Z alike, are ramping up to their first album since 2018’s Little Dark Age. Today they’re adding a third single from new album Loss Of Life to go along with “Mother Nature” and “Bubblegum Dog.”
“Nothing To Declare” takes MGMT’s psych-tinged art-pop into folky acoustic territory with stellar results. The arrangement is lovely, the melody is softly hypnotic, and the opening lyrics caught me off guard: “Nothing to declare/ Not even the bags under my eyes/ I can see you standing there/ But still there’s nothing to reply.”
The music video runs with the airline imagery. Directed by Joey Frank, it stars Inga Petry, who was born without arms, showing how she gets through a flight and other activities. Frank shared this statement:
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.
Petry offered her own words on the project:
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.
As an individual, the song and film resonated to me in another way as well. At the time of the initial filming I had just been diagnosed with Stage III Breast Cancer. This changed my personal perception of the film and pulled me away from seeing it as a way to artistically see how my character exists with differences within her environment, and made it an experience of the individual. At this point in time, to me, ‘Nothing To Declare’ no longer meant that you don’t have to explain your circumstances, but instead it felt like a literal statement going through the customs of life. After this diagnosis, I couldn’t exist as the same person I was. I had to put a lot of my personal goals aside to focus on my health and recovery. In that respect, I had to end one chapter of my life and enter a new one. A chapter that doesn’t care about who I was before or what aspirations I was striving toward. Instead, one that focuses on removing all the cancer and only then will I be able to start living again. My wish is for people to watch the video and enjoy the art and mystery. I hope the vulnerability and curiosity that we captured is felt by the viewer.
Watch below.
Loss Of Life is out 2/23 on Mom+Pop.