As snow cascades down over a tire in the opening scene to the latest single from Kygo featuring Kim Petras, “Broken Glass,” Griffin Stoddard’s dramatic visuals are punctuated by Petras herself, looking like some sort of hybrid of Yolandi Visser, Paris Hilton during her 21st birthday and Baby Spice. In her ethereal blondeness, Petras seems to be reflecting on a love that has ended, presumably with more than just a bittersweet finale. One might even surmise it was a full-fledged Shakespearean tragedy from the looks of the post-apocalyptic setting she’s found herself in.
And yet, no matter how far into the future we get, it always seems as though there are going to be cars in various states of disrepair pock-marking the deserts of a cliched post-apocalyptic milieu (one supposes we can thank Mad Max for that). Indeed, Petras appears to take a few cues from fellow collaborator Charli XCX’s video for “White Mercedes,” as she traipses through the vehicular wreckage. The symbolism, of course, is that she is reflecting on the wreckage of her own doomed rapport with an ex-love. One is surprised, however, that the image of broken glass is so few and far between, with shots of Petras standing on a car beneath the werewolf-inviting moon being more prevalent.
In this regard, one could more easily mistake Madonna’s 1994 track, “Take A Bow,” for a composition called “Broken Glass,” considering the video’s male lead, Emilio Muñoz, was obliged to walk over shards of M’s fallen perfume bottles and such in a shot that Michael Haussman immortalized with his penchant for cultivating iconography in Madonna’s videos (he also directed the sequel to “Take A Bow,” “You’ll See”). Brief as it is, it’s more memorable than the broken glass scene Petras has to offer for a song titled eponymously.
As for another single of a similar title, Annie Lennox’s “Walking on Broken Glass,” released in 1992 (when Madonna had already done the Marie Antoinette motif at the 1990 VMAs) the Sophie Muller-directed concept doesn’t make literal use of the term, however it does evoke the feeling of a woman masochistically doing as much on a metaphorical level as she continues to harbor feelings for her newly married former lover (played by John Malkovich, in a more dashing era), a fellow courtier who shows up for a night of quintessential revelry in the style of eighteenth century nobles. Petras, on the other hand, doesn’t even have an ex-lover to interact with, not in the moment or via flashbacks–her lone status meant to emanate all the pain we need to see.
While Petras can be an evocative actress (see: the “Icy” video), her looks of longing and regret might be better capitalized on with a bit of interaction incorporated somewhere within the frames. As the seventh single from Kygo’s third record, Golden Hour, “Broken Glass” might have been given less attention as a result of the days of our COVID-19 lives. To that point, Petras is perhaps doing her best to showcase that one can still look chic while social distancing. After all, isn’t that what grieving is all about: living melancholically inside one’s loneliness? Unwittingly, of course, Petras seems to be talking more about the end of a form of society we once knew as she tries her best to sound optimistic with the lines, “So cheers to us and what we had/Let’s keep dancin’ on the broken glass/And all that’s left is smoke and ash.” That’s definitely what the remains of any pre-pandemic existence can be described as.
