WATCH

directed by alexander thomas and nikki carmela

lighting by daniel barrios

on set photography from john carluccio

Some rights aren’t given back without a fight. We Must Prevail is a music video for the Phoenix punk outfit The Venomous Pinks — a declaration filmed in rain, in protest, and in grief.

The video opens on Lady Liberty weeping, a coat hanger clutched in her hands — a symbol of what is lost when bodily autonomy is stripped from the law. From there it cuts between the fury of a pro-abortion protest crowd and the band performing in a downpour, soaked and unrelenting. The rain isn’t incidental; it’s the mood — something between a storm that won’t break and one that already has.

The visual language is deliberately blunt. Protest imagery and punk rock have always spoken the same dialect — loud, physical, impossible to look away from. This video leans into that lineage. There’s no subtlety here because the subject doesn’t call for it.

Behind The Scenes

“We Must Prevail” was conceived, shot, and wrapped in seven hours — the kind of compressed timeline that strips away everything except instinct. The image of Lady Liberty clutching a coat hanger was the emotional core of the whole piece, drawn directly from a work of art my wife and I created together. She co-directed the video with me, and that shared vision meant we never had to explain to each other what we were going for — we already knew. The protest sequences were shot on location, the camera chasing real energy rather than staging it. The rain you see is both — some of it practical, some added in post — but all of it earned. Seven hours isn’t a lot of time to say something this urgent. It turned out to be exactly enough.”

“I wanted every frame to feel like a fist in the air. The rain, the crowd, Lady Liberty — these aren’t metaphors you have to decode. They’re a direct statement. The Venomous Pinks wrote a song that doesn’t flinch, and the video had to match that energy.”