Marsha Swanson – Generational Transmission (2025)
When an artist not only pushes the boundaries of genre but also expands the very notion of what a music video can be, you lean in. Marsha Swanson’s ‘Generational Transmission’ is such a moment; she intervenes in the conversation of how legacy, trauma, and identity are inscribed across time. For Swanson, pop is not a formula but a vessel for deep, cinematic storytelling; for director Sam Chegini, clay is not inert, but alive.
Right from the first note, ‘Generational Transmission’ grips you with its hypnotic spatiality. Swanson’s deliberate shift from piano to keyboard opens up expanses of sound, allowing each chord to breathe. There are moments here that feel suspended, as though time itself has loosened. Across the mix, Benet McClean’s layered violin assumes the weight of an entire orchestra, a resonant undercurrent to Swanson’s resolute voice. Keith Prior’s drumming lays the foundation with quiet authority, while the rest of the ensemble, Graham Knight, Benjamin Croft, Alex McGowan, and Henry Thomas, round out the production with refined depth. Recorded at the iconic Konk Studios, the track merges warm analogue resonance with a bold forwardness emblematic of her progressive pop vision.
But it’s the visual companion piece that elevates this single to something transcendent. The claymation video, Swanson’s fifth with Chegini and uniquely rendered through hand-sculpted figures “Clayton” and “Clayopatra”, acts as a living metaphor for the malleability of identity. Crafted against the backdrop of the Twelve-Day War, its production adds an undercurrent of resilience to what we bear and how that pressure shapes us. The figures absorb, fracture, and refract the hues of those who came before them, mirroring the way inheritance is both imposed and integrated. The glow of the protagonist flickers in time with internal reckoning; those moments illuminate that liberation isn’t singular; it’s collective.
Swanson herself calls the project a reckoning with what it means to take stock of familial legacy, and in doing so, she reclaims agency over what gets passed on. The echoes of her Hungarian-American childhood, filtered through memories of Hugo the Hippo and the song ‘Sing Song, Pass It Along’, cycle through the sound and sights of the piece, infusing it with a sense of tradition, endurance, and that most endangered commodity: hope.
‘Generational Transmission’ is a dialogue between mediums, materials, and memory. It asks us to consider lineage as something dynamic, mutable, holdable in our hands, like clay, and still able to transform. In this marriage of Swanson’s evocative songwriting and Chegini’s inventive direction, what emerges is a work that is as emotionally compelling as it is cinematically audacious. That’s the benchmark for modern progressive pop: to feel impossible until it isn’t.
Find out more about Marsha Swanson on her official website, Facebook, Instagram, and Spotify
