“The Melting of the Sun” is the second single from St. Vincent’s sixth album “Daddy’s Home”. The track is a hazy, psychedellic song largely focusing on guitar and vocals, with analogue synth washes and claviscords featuring in the latter half of the track. The song heavily features backup singers Lynne Fiddmont-Lindsey and Kenya Hathaway, which further cements the 20th century sound of the song: having distinct background vocalists largely fell out of favour in the late 1990s – the main singer would often record the background vocals instead.

The track debuted alongside a lyric video, and on April 8, 2021, a music video was released. The video claims to be from “Candy’s Music Video Archives”, restored from a Betamax tape. Betamax was the first consumer videotape format, marketed by Sony in 1975. It subsquently became engaged in a format war with JVC’s competing Video Home System (VHS) format which came to market a year later. Though it “lost” the format war, Betamax has a cult following even to this day.

Like the video for “Pay Your Way in Pain” – the first single from “Daddy’s Home” – it is presented in 4:3 format, authentic to how video was presented from the day television was invented all the way to the late 2000s when widescreen TVs became common.

Unlike the video for “Pay Your Way in Pain”, “The Melting of the Sun” is largely a cartoon animated video, with live action footage of St. Vincent superimposed on various scenes of the video. The live action footage is rendered at half the framerate of the rest of the video, giving the appearance of very early non-linear video editing. The scenes in the video are animated in the style of “Schoolhouse Rock!” an educational television series intended for children that was originally broadcast from 1973 – 1984. The animations ironically match up with the lyrics in depicting various 20th century American pop-culture icons, and their struggles with fame, addiction, and institutional sexism. St. Vincent described these references in an interview with Rolling Stone as “a love letter to strong, brilliant female artists”, discussing how they “survived in an environment that was … hostile to them.”