Yellowknife rock-metal band Gnarwhal and NWT studio Artless Collective have teamed up to produce a music video that pairs a terrifying narwhal with an equally terrifying exploration of last year’s wildfires.
If ever a video needed a trigger warning, it’s this one. If you’re still processing the fires that threatened NWT communities last year (and this year), bear in mind they’re a key theme here.
Speaking of bears, bears have a super rough time in this video. At one point, a bear is on fire.
The video is set to Gnarwhal track The War/Nothing More.
In a statement, the band called the video “a fever-dream assault on the senses” that tells the story of the band “in the sudden throes of fighting for their northern home, burning to the ground by wildfire.”
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The statement describes the setting as a “strange alternate Yellowknife … full of smoke, black charred forests and strange illusions,” though that sounds to Cabin Radio pretty-much like last year’s actual Yellowknife.
According to Gnarwhal, many of the surreal scenes in the video were created using a mix of live action and “new AI technology.”
If you need a guide to what you’re watching, the band says the story is as follows:
“After being spit out of the belly of a narwhal, the men are in possession of the last four ‘seeds’ available to mankind (not revealed til the end) and they must travel towards their own demise across the desiccated landscape, surviving a dangerous and surreal journey to ‘plant’ the last ‘seeds’ in a specific location. There they will pay the ultimate sacrifice to initiate the regrowth of their charred world in a hot and searing fever dream.”
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Connecting the video back to last year, the band added that 2023 was “a messy, scary, disturbing, wild, incomprehensible, maddening, dangerous and disorienting experience for an entire territory.”
“We want to represent a fever-dream version of our new reality as an act of personal catharsis,” the band continued, “that speaks to our reality that wildfires act as nature’s regenerative agent and bring forth rebirth.”
“Sometimes only through brutality and pain is life started anew,” the band concluded.
