Won't Stand Down (video)

The "Kueen"

The "WSD Army"

The "Creature"

Muse video
Name	Won't Stand Down
Album/single	Will of the People
Length	4:01
Initial air date	13th January 2022
Filming Location	Kyiv, Ukraine
Director	Jared Hogan
Watch	YouTube

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Information

First music video for the first single, Won't Stand Down, off of the upcoming album. It was released together with the single itself on January 13th, 2022, at 3PM GMT. ^[1]

Up until a few days before the release, very few teases were shown regarding the music video (only ones being the short snippet on Muse's TikTok^[2], Bellamy teasing with a screenshot of him^[3] and another screenshot from the video posted on Muse's Instagram^[4]), until a longer music video tease was posted by Muse on an Instagram story on January 12th, 24 hours before the release, together with a YouTube premiere link.

Shot in an undisclosed location somewhere in Kyiv, Ukraine, the video has been produced by MrMr Films, a production company based in London and co-produced by Production Shelter, a Kyiv-based Ukrainian production company. The video was directed by Jared Hogan, while overall creative direction has been handled by Jesse Lee Stout and Metaform Studio, with support from Lark Creative.

The video is nominated for the MTV Video Music Award 2022 under the "Best Rock" category, with contenders including Jack White's video for "Taking Me Back", Foo Fighters's video for "Love Dies Young", Red Hot Chili Peppers's video for "Black Summer", Shinedown's video for "Planet Zero" and Three Days Grace's video for "So Called Life". Voting can be done on MTV VMA's official website.

Description

The video depicts a mysterious figure, named "Kueen" (or simply "Queen" by the director himself), that siphons the collective energy of a dark army to transmute into an augmented being.^[5] Kueen is, despite looking like Bellamy wearing make-up, actually played by an actress, wearing the grotesque Bellamy mask, which starts her journey on a wheelchair, dressed in a white gown, which, by the end of the video, later transforms into a dark grim creature, played by an actor, with a completely different mask, the same which was featured in the Instagram filter Muse put out a few days prior to the release, and also appears throughout other artworks of the album.^[6]

Trivia

The mask worn by the two characters, pushing the wheelchair and attaching the finger device to the hand at the beginning, is similar to the ones worn by 'Nameles Ghouls', masked band members of the Swedish metal band 'Ghost'.^[7]
The same two characters both wear the mysterious monogram pattern on their suit, identical to the one seen on the single cover. The monogram also appears on the wheelchair armrest and even as the car emblem, which can be seen in the BTS gallery below
First music video after Resistance to be filmed in a 4:3 ratio in it's entirety