They gave me a crown of stone and told me to swim
Gotta keep ‘em feeding, keep ‘em needing, keep ‘em waiting
I hear them calling, all applauding, god it’s deafening
And I’ll surrender cause I’ll never be the same
Jacquelyn Dady (better known as Nyxx) storms the stage like a nocturnal deity with blood on her boots. Channeling chaos and command, she cuts through the din with razor-sharp lyricism and bass-heavy bravado, balancing fury and femininity with a dancer’s poise and a fighter’s stance. In Crown, the New York artist’s latest single and video – featuring a feral guest turn from GenCAB – Nyxx doesn’t just wear power, she bleeds beneath it.
What begins as pageantry turns to punishment. The crown? It crushes. The praise? It poisons. Crown careens through the spectacle of performance and the pain it demands…every bowed head, every cracked voice – a toll. Nyxx drags us into the limelight’s vice grip, where applause echoes like a threat and the stage becomes a sacrificial circle. This isn’t empowerment….it’s endurance. A coronation as crucifixion, Crown reminds us that glory often grinds its chosen raw.
“Crown is about the suffocating cycle of pressure, inevitability, and surrender, whether from within or from the outside world,” says Nyxx. “Being dragged down by expectations, drowning under the weight, and told to keep going anyway. It’s relentless, it’s crushing, and there’s no way out, only forward.”
Shot by Tim Van Horn with a dirt-under-nails defiance, the DIY video tracks Nyxx at a dead-end station, toes to the tracks, eyes on elsewhere. She bolts: off-platform, off-script…through fields that hiss with freedom and forests thick with feral promise. It’s flight as defiance, movement as mutiny. A creek, cold and uncaring, becomes altar and exit wound; a place where escape isn’t just possible, but primal.
Watch the video for “Crown” below:
Crown is featured on her latest EP, salt, out now via Shvdow Records.
“salt represents release and transformation,” she says. “The arch of the track list brings you through a descent into depression, the act of processing it, the necessity of purging, and finally, the euphoric freedom you find on the other side.”
Once a firestarter in a high school pop-punk pit, Nyxx scorched her own path: igniting in 2013 with Wicked, but truly striking in 2016’s Nightmare, a self-produced blitz built in a Los Angeles apartment thick with ambition. After a stretch of silence, she returned in 2023…reawakened, reloaded, ushering in sleep-paralysis shimmer and unleashing blood-and-teeth energy alongside MORIS BLAK on the ferociously titled FERAL.
Catch Nyxx at Dark Force Fest on 2 May at the Sheraton Parsippany Hotel in New Jersey.
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