Synopsis

The video presents How To Dress Well's Tom Krell in a series of intimate, abstract close-ups. His face and body appear through smoke, flickering light, and heavily saturated fields of red, yellow, and blue, while shadowy forms and apparitions drift around him. Rather than illustrating a literal story, the clip turns the song's wounded, yearning mood into a visceral inner landscape. Krell is often obscured or partially masked, making the performance feel less like a conventional portrait and more like an unstable emotional memory.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video was created by the Canadian visual collective Video Marsh and premiered in early June 2013, a few months after "Don't Say No" appeared on Shlohmo's *Laid Out* EP.

• The production unfolded over several months and involved approximately 40 separate filming sessions, all taking place indoors.

• The saturated color scheme was designed to suggest an inner world shaped by heartache and haunting memories. The imagery was conceived as a kind of mirror for the viewer rather than a fixed narrative.

• Tom Krell is deliberately difficult to see clearly. The visual team felt that a straightforward depiction of him would not fit the song's subjective, filtered reality.

• Before making the finished video, the filmmakers had already worked with Krell on an experimental scene at an apartment. Krell and a friend of the filmmakers, who had never met, exchanged dark stories before he sang to her while smoking a cigarette.

• The close, uncomfortable framing and layered color treatment match the track's combination of fragile falsetto, sparse percussion, hazy synths, and emotionally charged R&B textures.

• The video's production credits identify Krell himself, Nic Brown, and Jennifer Truong as cinematographers, with Brown also handling the edit.