In the year and two days since she posted "Catch" on Soundcloud, the pop persona known as Allie X has never, to my knowledge, revealed her eyes. In that song's video, directed by Jérémie Saindon and debuted on Dazed and Confused yesterday, the opaque glasses come off in seconds, and while that's sinking in she flashes past as the Visible Woman, her torso and half her face flayed; before the first chorus, she's lying in the middle of a pile of pale, naked bodies. If this isn't the boldest, most oddly beautiful unveiling in recent pop history, I have no idea what is. Down to the last shot, the video is a riot of twitching layers, smashing-cutting from cold and stylized to jarringly intimate. Mysterious alter egos are delicate things, their seductive power easily broken with the wrong balance of revealing and withholding; here, X reveals a lot, but far more questions are opened than answered. This must be what dissecting a live unicorn is like.
CollXtion I, the first proper Allie X release, will appear in April, featuring the three songs she's posted on Soundcloud and four new ones. Watch the "Catch" video, above, and check out X's interactive "Xart" project here.