With Gold Star, Good Citizen, Callie Crofts of the Salt Lake City art pop band Die Shiny delivers a cri de coeur, a broadside on the evil perpetrated by the powerful, which ordinary people ignore: a collective failure to prevent crimes against humanity.

If that's a difficult message that nevertheless needs to be heard, the video, directed by Utah-based director Ryan Margetts, visualises this with extraordinary power and clarity. It's a stunning piece of work, a real tour de force.

Margetts's video places Crofts, in ballroom gown, within a group of dancers, initially blindfolded, each one penned in by a tiny version of that resonant symbol of American values and decency - the white picket fence.

This is a brilliant device, as the dancers' interaction with their own mini-picket fence complicates its meaning. Now the fence represents isolation, imprisonment, physical and mental, and more. They are also set up in formation, strongly suggesting regimentation, as Crofts repeats her mantra: Gold star, good citizen.

This is very direct - like political theatre crossed with musical theatre - driven with passion and purpose. Margetts use of camera positions and editing never allows the intensity to drop - in fact, it just gets more intense, with one final burst of symbolism. It's not subtle but its still a real gut-punch. You may be moved in ways you did not expect.

Crofts wrote the song in a one session and debuted it live within a week, performed minimally at a protest on the steps of the Utah State Capitol. And it was released, very deliberately, on 4th July. 

“A fan recently commented that we should write the new national anthem," she says. "If I were ever to attempt such a thing, this would be that song.”  

It's resulted in one hell of a music video. A bolt from the blue - from a queer art-pop band in Salt Lake City, Utah.