The tables are floating in ale and semen, people dreaming of their dream to come true
I wrap my legs around one of the broad chested doñas and she sticks to me like glue
The camera opens on a blistered horizon. A truck crawls through the Oaxacan desert like a wounded animal, its engine coughing up prayers to the dust. Inside sits Stian Leknes, the man behind Leknes & The Layoffs, whose Nahual video feels less like a performance than a fevered confession from someone who’s seen too much and isn’t done seeing. The song, a foretaste of their upcoming album M.S. Playhead Volume I, thrums with a noir pulse, its organs and saxophones exhaling like lost souls in an after-hours chapel. We’ve seen this guy before in his previous video for San Miguel, but this one ups the drama of the storyline.
The film, directed by Leknes himself and assembled by Snorre Hovdal with gorgeous cinematography from Mala Onda Studios, looks like it was shot through a whiskey glass left sweating on a jukebox. There’s something ritualistic in its pacing: each shot held a moment too long, each face caught between repentance and relapse. Leknes pulls into a desolate bar that feels conjured from collective dream logic: part Wizard of Oz, part Blues Brothers, and part Star Wars cantina. Inside, the clientele are sirens and sinners, cowboys gone crooked by time. It’s a place where a beer costs your conscience and every song might start a fight.
“Nahual is inspired from the legends of the Nahuales from Mexican natives — shapeshifters that take on an animal body,” says Leknes. “For this song, I was particularly inspired by the Nahual de coyote, who enters towns and causes a lot of mischief. In addition, the concept of the Nahual is also a metaphor for a persona you have created while writing that takes on a life of its own. This is a theme that reoccurs in many of the lyrics from the M.S. Playhead albums — the struggle to differentiate between yourself and the character you have created, or maybe even more so, the challenge when your fictional character takes over your life.”
That tension between author and alter ego runs through every frame. The editing and VFX by Hovdal turn the dust and heat into a hallucination; the colour grading slides from sunburnt ochre to the bruised blues of regret. The song itself, indebted to The Doors and Mark Lanegan as much as Leonard Cohen and Timber Timbre, trudges forward on toms that sound like heartbeats in exile.
Saxophones growl through the room like alley preachers, their notes spitting sparks against the smoke. Beneath it all, the drums swagger and stutter in a half-jazz delirium, pushing the whole mess forward with the precision of chaos. Leknes drags his audience through a fevered purgatory, passion laid bare and burning, the kind of descent where you crawl through every circle of hell just to find the bartender still pouring.
Violence blooms like a barroom flower. The camera doesn’t flinch. The sequence is choreographed chaos: bottles fly, fists connect, blood turns into choreography. Leknes, both witness and participant, becomes a kind of noir pilgrim. As he leaves the wreckage, he befriends a lone donkey and drifts into the sunset, neither redeemed nor damned, just returned to motion.
Nahual feels like a dispatch from the borderlands of psyche and geography alike; a world where the barroom becomes confessional, the landscape an accomplice, and the outlaw learns that exile and enlightenment share the same road out of town.
Watch the video for “Nahual” below:
Listen to Nahual below and order the single here.
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