The music video for East London singer-songwriter and record producer NAO's (Neo Jessica Joshua) breakout hit "Bad Blood" features simple - yet striking - imagery. In an abandoned and dilapidated industrial building, a nude and bald young black woman walks up to several middle-aged and old white men. They make brief eye contact with each other, before barren stems and branches shoot out of their mouths and eyes (there appears to be a reference to the myth of Apollo and Daphne here). One blonde woman who awakens from a coffin is spared, but another brunette is not. Towards the end of the song - where NAO's supple vocals shift into a high octave wail as she sings "Don’t tell me I’m cool/ Coo-ku-ku-ku-OOOO!" - the black woman is seen kneeling and convulsing on the floor, and then promptly suffering from the same fate.
There might be some embedded racial politics in the video's premise, but it also reflects the song's exploration of the psychic aftermath following the fallout of a relationship:
'Do you remember?The riding, the passion, the falling overAnd tripping on iceSharing advice, taking it twiceBut let us not forget theSilent day, stripped awayTime and placeOh, you choose not to rememberFly away, counting daysI'm hiding from you, ooh'
Lyrics: Genius
The details are vague, conveyed in evocative metaphors that draw more attention to themselves instead of describing the past: 'You're a holiday/ A glass of ocean slipping down my throat[...] Drinking lime and bitter from my lemonade/ White horses, maritime won't do". This isn't an autopsy of a failed relationship, but rather an emotional purging and cleansing of the speaker's mind. Accompanied by modern, minimalist and genre-blending instrumentation (which marries electronic music, funk and R&B), NAO's arresting vocals glide, swoop and dip into the vowels and consonants in each verse. There are choruses of sighs and drum kicks, pools of silence and blaring synths that announce the song's cathartic conclusion:
'I think it is the, know that it's theI think it is the bad, bad bloodI think it is the, know that it's theI think it is the bad, bad blood'
