Key Takeaways
- Swedish House Mafia released a video for their Lykke Li-assisted single "Happiness Is So Sad," filmed with roughly 25 phone cameras at a house party in Guadalajara, Mexico.
- Director Theo Lindquist and co-director Jorge G. Camarena use multiple perspectives to create a fragmented, intimate story about nostalgia, fleeting happiness, and the pain of leaving joyful moments behind.
- Released in late July, the track became a summer fixture at Swedish House Mafia’s Ushuaïa Ibiza residency.
Swedish House Mafia have released a new video for their latest single "Happiness Is So Sad" featuring Lykke Li — watch it below.
Directed by Theo Lindquist with co-director Jorge G. Camarena, the video was shot entirely using around 25 phone cameras at a house party in Guadalajara, Mexico. Designed to capture the party from multiple perspectives, the various people in attendance help tell the night's fragmented, contradictory, and intimate story.
"Phones have created a new visual language. It hasn't really been exploited in storytelling properly, and here was an opportunity," Lindquist said of the technique used to make the video.
According to a press release, the story grew out of Lykke Li's lyrics and the song’s title, which led Lindquist and co-writer Scott to nostalgia, the transience of happiness and mono no aware, the Japanese idea of the pathos of things. The happiest moments become the hardest to leave behind precisely because they were never meant to last.
Released on at the end of July, "Happiness Is So Sad" became a fixture of Swedish House Mafia's Ushuaïa Ibiza residency across the summer, played to tens of thousands each week before the video arrived.
The group's last album was 2022's Paradise Again, which features the hit single "Moth to a Flame" featuring The Weeknd.
