Breanna Barbara released a new single, “Big Bang Blues,” last month, and now she’s back with another. “The Way Out” is dark and foreboding, with just Breanna’s delicate guitar and smokey voice to power it. “I wrote ‘The Way Out’ before the pandemic hit but it’s been coming into my head more and more since the dread of the news this past year,” Breanna says. “It’s a song about desiring an escape from one’s own mind, body and world. That feeling of pining and longing to get outside of your own life or existence. For me personally when I manage to get out, be it through movement or music, there is a calming presence that makes me forget for a second. And through that moment always.”

“The Way Out” comes with a striking black-and-white video made by Mexican director J. Xavier Velasco, with Emmy-nominated cinematographer Alejandro Mejia and featuring dancer/choreographer Kibrea Carmichael. “Since the beginning Breanna knew that she wanted a dark ‘Lynchean’ atmosphere and when she told me that, I was immediately hooked,” Velasco says. “After listening to the song and digging into the meaning of the lyrics, I knew that there were powerful concepts to explore so we talked back and forth narrowing down the elements that we needed in order to convey what we wanted to explore visually and conceptually. For instance, the clairvoyant serves as a metaphor for the power of intuition and the overimposed imaginary creates different meanings exploring concepts like the perception of time, equality and the exploration of the inner self. We wanted to evoke a feeling of freedom, rawness and nostalgia so the idea of having a dancer (Kibrea Carmichael) alluringly moving to the counterbit of the song came to my mind and from there the rest of the elements fell in place organically. From the beginning I knew this had to be shot in black and white and so when the cinematographer Alejandro Mejía got on board, it became clear that shooting in 16mm was imperative in order to get the raw grainy high contrast image that would sustain and catapult the song’s visual experience.”

You can watch the video below.