Greta Thunberg appears in the new video for 'Retrograde.' | Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Seventeen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg appears in Pearl Jam’s latest music video.
The American rock band’s video for “Retrograde,” taken from their new album “Gigaton,” premiered on May 14 and stars Thunberg as a fortune teller. She predicts a grim reality: natural disasters, like floods and avalanches, happening all around the world.
The message of the animated video is clear. It’s the same one Thunberg has based her campaign around since 2018: we fight the climate crisis now or we do nothing and face this future.
The climate crisis isn’t the only current issue tackled on “Gigaton.” The tracks “Seven O Clock” and “Quick Escape” both reference U.S. President Donald Trump. The lyrics for the latter include “crossed the border to Morocco, Kashmir to Marrakesh. The lengths we had to go to then, to find a place Trump hadn’t [expletive] up yet.”
Pearl Jam isn’t the first band to team up with Thunberg. Last year, she recorded a spoken word essay for the British pop-rock band The 1975. The recording is the first track on the band’s album “Notes on a Conditional Form.”
“We are right now at the beginning of a climate and ecological crisis. And we need to call it what it is: an emergency,” she says on the record.
She later adds: “We can no longer save the world by playing by the rules because the rules have to be changed, everything needs to change, and it has to start today.”
More recently, Thunberg’s international youth movement Friday’s For Future released its own video, albeit not a music one. The 60-second clip is named after Thunberg’s now-iconic Our House is on Fire speech, given at the World Economic Forum in Davos last year.
The clip shows a family going about their daily routine, seemingly oblivious that their house is engulfed in flames. The final message reads: “Our house is on fire. React.”
In her Davos speech, Thunberg said: “We all have a choice. We can create transformational action that will safeguard the living conditions for future generations. Or we can continue with our business as usual and fail.”
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