Jessie Reyez released her long-awaited debut album Before Love Came To Kill Us earlier this year. Before its release, the singer had spent the months prior teasing the album with a handful of singles and accompanying videos. Rather than releasing videos with intricate choreography like some of her pop star counterparts, each one of her visuals tells a story. On Friday, the singer released her harrowing “Same Side” video, and it details a dark narrative.
The visual opens with Reyez sitting alone in a room and attempting to calm herself before she loads several bullets into a gun. The singer sets up camp inside a junkyard and waits, gun in lap, for a car to arrive. Eventually, a white van pulls up and her victim is thrown out onto the ground. Pointing her gun at her victim, who is actually her ex-lover, Reyez tries to muster up the courage to pull the trigger. But, her plan doesn’t go quite as expected.
While the video seems like it doesn’t end well for Reyez, the distressing visual is actually the prequel to her 2019-released visual “Crazy.” The previously-released visual opens seconds after the ending plot twist in “Same Side.”
Ahead of the visual’s release, Reyez said in a statement that she felt uneasy releasing an album during a global pandemic: “It messed me up because I was like ‘I don’t want to seem insensitive,'” she said. “I’ve grown up thinking about death as something that could easily happen tomorrow. But I know that for everybody else, there’s a lot of fear right now. I’m conflicted. But I’ve decided I’m putting it out because indecision never did anything for nobody.”
Watch Reyez’s “Same Side” video above.
Before Love Came To Kill Us is out now via Island. Get it here.
