Nada Surf Release 10-Minute Short Film for ‘Just Wait’

Nada Surf have released a 10-minute short music film for their song “Just Wait,” directed by Mark Pellington.

The visual serves as an abstract accompaniment to the song, filmed in Los Angeles, Cambridge, and Sydney. Pellington, who has worked with artists as diverse as Imagine Dragons, Low, Chelsea Wolfe, and Damien Marley, says he wanted to bring a soulful quality to the “Just Wait” project.

“Matthew Caws and I connected, and we decided to collaborate together on this music film, a labor of love inspired by his late father Peter Caws’ profound meditations,” Pellington tells Rolling Stone. “The piece actually benefited from the coronavirus as we really took our time, let ideas percolate, and did not feel a need to rush and make a product. Matthew is a very generous artist and let me interpret pretty freely. We really connected to the themes of the piece, and I was magnificently inspired by his relationship to his late father, the words he created and they shared. This meditative philosophical fabric served as the character’s fuel in the film.”

Pellington describes the filming process across three countries as “very free-form, unscripted, and completely motivated by the music.”

“The loose idea of a silver-clad faceless ‘traveler’ moving through these lights and image landscapes was conceived as a narrative through-line, and this constant imagistic metaphor was captured in all three countries,” he says.