Matilda Finn has been describing music as colour since childhood. The condition has a name, synaesthesia, but in her case it is the engine of the work. She sees songs as rooms, as weather, as figures that walk into the frame. The job, as she has described it in interviews with Crack and Shoot, is to translate the picture in her head into something a viewer can stand inside.
She has done it well enough to have already become inevitable. Best New Director at the UK Music Video Awards two years in a row, 2017 and 2018, then a Best Director nomination by 2019. Music videos for Bicep, Danny Brown, Obongjayar, Bipolar Sunshine and AlunaGeorge that look genuinely unlike anything else in the cycle. Bicep's Aura was the early calling card, all halogen reds and sweat and slowed time. Danny Brown's Lost was a study in claustrophobic interiors. Obongjayar's Endless found a way to make running a spiritual gesture.
This year she has signed to Stink Films for representation in London and the United States, with Love Song handling additional U.S. duties. The newest reels read as a director moving up a tier. Promnesia, Oh How Sweet It Is, The Audition for Armani Beauty, and Waiting for Vera all came out in April alone. The commercial work is now sitting alongside the personal projects without feeling smaller.
What I keep coming back to is the texture. Finn shoots the way some directors paint. Light is a mood, not an exposure. Faces are landscapes. Even the brand spots feel hand-built, the way a photograph by Elaine Constantine still feels developed in a sink.
There is a lineage here. Floria Sigismondi, early Chris Cunningham, the music-video-as-short-film tradition that almost died in the streaming era. Finn is one of the directors keeping it alive, with the difference that her surrealism is warmer, less industrial, more interested in the body as a soft instrument than as a shock device.
Watch Aura first. Then The Audition. Then keep your eye on whatever drops next, because she is moving very fast.
