ULVER Unveil Cinematic Video for ‘Hollywood Babylon’, Starring Sara Khorami

Ulver return to the world of ‘Hollywood Babylon’, the haunting track from their 2024 album “Liminal Animals”, with a new music video directed by Trista Namo. The clip expands the song’s already unsettling universe into a grotesque, retro-futuristic visual landscape starring Sara Khorami, where the absurd, the uncanny and the familiar begin to overlap.

The video arrives after Gazelle Twin‘s reinterpretation of the track, a brooding remix that introduced another layer of darkness to Ulver‘s original composition. Now, the Norwegian cult act returns to the song through a different medium, offering a visual counterpart that feels equally strange, theatrical and deeply attuned to the fractured atmosphere of the music.

“Working with our wonderfully mad old friend Christian Mona from the Bogus Blimp days never disappoints,” writes Ulver mastermind Kristoffer Rygg. Mona began working on the video before the release of “Liminal Animals”, eventually completing what Rygg describes as a “splendidly grotesque little gem” emerging from the artist’s own Automated Bathroom.

“‘Hollywood Babylon’ has never looked better,” Rygg adds. “It is a distorted mirror of our times. Please feel free to stare into it a little too long.”

The collaboration also marks a return to a creative relationship that stretches back two decades. In 2025, Ulver and the Norwegian visual artist collective AKFF! celebrated twenty years since the release of the animated video for ‘It Is Not Sound’. The experience eventually led to a renewed exchange between the musicians and the artists, opening the way for a new visual journey through Ulver‘s constantly expanding universe.

“Thinking back on what a great experience it was to visualise and expand on Ulver’s universe, we started wondering why AKFF! hadn’t made more videos with Ulver,” Christian Mona explains. “As it turns out, Ulver had been thinking along the same lines.”

The song’s existing sonic world was further transformed by Gazelle Twin, the alias of English composer, producer and musician Elizabeth Bernholz. Ulver first encountered her music during a shared appearance at Austria’s Donau Festival in 2017, and the connection eventually led to her remix of ‘Hollywood Babylon’.

“We became instant fans of Gazelle Twin,” Rygg recalls. “Her approach captures the song’s essence while adding new and different layers of emotional depth and contemporary resonance.”

For Bernholz, the track offered a rich and instinctive creative space. “I have really enjoyed working on ‘Hollywood Babylon’ – it is such a great song,” she says. “I love the vibe, chord sequences, vocals and lyrics, which feel ever more prescient. I wanted to bring all those things to the foreground, plus add a bit of GT darkness and my voice.”

The new video places Iranian-Norwegian actress Sara Khorami at its centre, with Ulver describing her as the star of the “retro-futuristic gem” initiated, curated and created by Johnsen & Mona. Her presence becomes another element in the video’s unstable visual language, where the familiar is continuously bent into something stranger.

With its layered history, its collaborative lineage and its vision of a world that feels increasingly close to the one it reflects, the new ‘Hollywood Babylon’ video extends Ulver‘s fascination with the space between music and image. The result is a piece that does not simply illustrate the song, but gives its unease a new physical form.