Warning: This video is slightly NSFW.
The coda on her debut EP Por Vida, Kali Uchis‘ slow jam “Loner” sounds like the long sigh that follows a final, bruising heartbreak.
“‘Cause I was a loner until I met you, and I let you in after the persuasian, mind games, manipulations,” Uchis laments on the song, sounding spent. “That’s why I’d rather be a loner… I don’t even wanna know you.”
In song’s new video — co-directed by Uchis and premiered today by Dazed — she pouts in a series of saucy outfits, shown poured over a bed, strutting around a gloomy scrapyard and sipping a milkshake at an empty lunch counter. It’s very 1950s Los Angeles, seen through a 1970s lens.
As the ex-Virginia resident tells Dazed, “I was inspired by mermaids, call girls, the actress Mia Farrow, the film Scarface and the director Quentin Tarantino.”