‘El Paso, Elsewhere’ debuts action-packed music video for ‘Stay Awake’

El Paso, Elsewhere is bursting at the seams with werewolves, vampires, and “more slow-motion dives than you would think it is humanly possible to fit into a single video game”. Now, the upcoming third-person shooter can add an animated music video to its list, with the release of an animated music video for the game’s original track ”Stay Awake’.

• READ MORE: Xalavier Nelson Jr is opening Pandora’s box

If you know developer Strange Scaffold‘s founder, Xalavier Nelson Jr, this music video won’t come as a complete surprise. Neither will the fact that Nelson Jr is on vocals, all while working on the rest of the game. The prolific developer has an exhaustive creative well: when he’s not making an 11-track rap album for El Paso, Elsewhere, he’s creating a game about bank-robbing animals, or the aptly-titled Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, which does exactly what it says on the spleen.

Speaking to NME, Nelson Jr explains that the goal for El Paso, Elsewhere‘s soundtrack was to capture a sense of “existential violence,” apt for a supernatural neo-noir shooter. But three years ago, Nelson Jr and long-time Strange Scaffold collaborator RJ Lake were hitting a “baffling” wall: none of their attempts at capturing “existential violence” were panning out, until the pair realised that vocals were too important to miss.

“I think I literally said ‘Oh shit, we’re gonna have to make a rap album,'” says Nelson. “We both laughed, because we didn’t fully realise the implications of that event. Here we are three years later, with an 11-track rap album — this has gone much further than we ever expected it needed to go!”

This isn’t Nelson Jr’s first foray into music. The developer has contributed songs, rap and spoken word poetry to previous games, but ‘Stay Awake’ and the wider El Paso, Elsewhere soundtrack is a major step up.

“If we were going to have needle drops in this video game, I wanted it to be good — or better — than if we had purchased music,” explains Nelson Jr, who says making a rap album and a game simultaneously is like juggling chainsaws while studying for medical school

On the music video for ‘Stay Awake’, Nelson Jr worked with Demente Animation Studio to hammer home a theme that’s been with El Paso, Elsewhere since its inception. “Villainy and violence are complicated,” he says, “and the closer you get to this thing that’s trying to destroy you, it’s often trying to get closer to you as well.”

Check it out below:

The road to making ‘Stay Awake’ has been difficult, and Nelson Jr admits he’d “never recommend” anyone else tries to follow in his chainsaw-juggling footsteps. Yet the result is, in Nelson Jr’s words, something “really special” — a soundtrack every bit as unique and from-the-heart as El Paso, Elsewhere sets out to be.

“It’s been a deeply challenging process, but also one of the most rewarding of my career,” says Nelson Jr. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

El Paso, Elsewhere launches later this year, and you can wishlist it here.

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