Phrases / Mars Roesner
The Taino Spiral, an historical image of nature’s pressure of rebirth, unfurls past the cinematic body of LEXXE’s new music video for ‘Otherside’, towards a hypnotic enlargement in her private {and professional} presence.
‘Otherside’ depicts LEXXE arriving on the literal manifestation of demise and the afterlife, a graveyard. Styled by Phil Gomez, and filmed by Michael Morales within the extreme but intoxicating daylight of a cemetery, LEXXE invitations us to see a brand new aspect of her Scorpionic energy. Among the many headstones, we bear witness to her battle and subversion of generational shadows linking by her late father to her late paternal grandmother, Maria.
Although their relationship has layers, LEXXE fondly remembers Maria as a big supporter and now inspiration to return to her roots as a educated dancer, a label she now proudly embraces. As she strikes her physique fluidly by the cemetery, Lexxe is meditating on and providing up tough truths whereas releasing her doubts on the altar of all of the deceased family members in her lineage, particularly Maria.
All through the brief movie, edited and directed by LEXXE’s fiancé Alexa San Román, her anguish is palpable, her want realized, and her bigger coiling grief bared. LEXXE weaves prayer into her lyrics, burying and giving relaxation to worn-out cycles. In direction of the tip of the video, she emerges by a portal, launched into her ‘otherside’ (which isn’t heaven, by the best way). LEXXE honors the affect and significance of her previous even on this new passage, depicted within the footage of Maria and different relations dancing throughout her new skies.
Nothing on this video is unintended; LEXXE expresses how lore not solely feeds her course of, however defines it, with secret meanings and easter eggs that echo into her whole discography. LEXXE and her artistic crew’s selections to lean deeper right into a softer, daylight-flooded aesthetic are purposeful right here, paralleling her internal evolutions and exploration of her softer sides. She is transferring upwards and outwards, in the direction of femininity, lovely union along with her accomplice, and maybe essentially the most well-known classical stage in New York (shhhhhh!).
This track, and her subsequent album (but to be revealed), are a devotional for these larger-than-life feminine figures, mortal AND legendary. LEXXE grew up in a deeply non secular, Puerto Rican Catholic household, and although she’s not as non secular as she as soon as was, she nonetheless finds immense magnificence and luxury within the extreme and easy gothic foundations of the religion.
LEXXE refers to herself as a Bruja, a time period for a spiritualist or healer mixing Latin American, Indigenous, African, and European practices. Her music is etched with the affect of nighttime goddesses and water spirits. Mary, Rhiannon, Yemaya, and Atabey, to call a number of. Actually a siren calling again her energy, Otherside is proof that LEXXE has many extra sides and phantasms left to discover.
Step behind the veil with these unique behind-the-scenes images by Sam San Román, captured throughout the making of Otherside:
