Night Wilds Talks Concept Album & Layered Storytelling in Exclusive Interview

Today we’re chatting with Night Wilds about their upcoming concept album All That Should Have Been and their recent music video for “New Jerusalem” This forthcoming 17-track rock opera invites listeners on a captivating journey through a fantastical circus world, reflecting the deeply personal struggles of its lead singer-songwriter, Seth.

Crafted within the iconic studios of Seattle, and accompanied by world-class musicians and vintage equipment, the album weaves together the tapestries of prog-rock with meaningful lyrics, taking inspiration from musical legends such as Pink Floyd and Radiohead. We chat with Seth about the album and music video—check it out below!

Congratulations on the release of your “New Jerusalem” music video! This song and video are quite intricate, delving into pretty powerful emotions and themes. Could you share some insights into the creative process behind bringing this to life?

I knew I had a very specific story to tell and storyboarded this video frame by frame. In this case the story is about what happens to children when they are forced to hide who they are within the confines of belief systems, organizations and even cults and the incredible power of those systems on young minds. For me, I grew up in a very fundamentalist religion which prescribed a very linear pathway to God, obviously through the men in charge. My father was a leader in our congregation and as such nothing mattered more than upholding the image of what a true believer should be. We had to be more than human, mirrors instead of children. There are so many places like this across the earth and I think this story would be understood by anyone who has been in a place like this. I spent quite a while finding and casting the right people, with the right energy for these parts and ending up editing and coloring the final variant together, even doing the SFX and comping myself. I loved working with the production company who filmed this but realized what I wanted was so incredibly specific and so personal I might just need to do it myself to get it right. Probably not the most scalable of habits.

The video is divided into two acts, each with its own symbolism and emotion. Can you tell us more about that?

The first act sets the story up. The young boy dutifully going to hear his father preach, noticing the cute girl as the car stops and coming alive for a moment before returning back to his world and the coldness of the back of his mother’s head. There are hints in the beginning of abuse, the red stains on his collar, the subtle bruising of his wrists. This is not just a story of mental or religious suffering but also of how force is used to create compliance and to protect images. The lyrics tells the story in this act of a child who cannot figure out who he is or who he is supposed to be and begins to simply become the best version of all that is expected of him and in doing so has lost himself. It tells the story of the feeling like a war is present but no one talks of it, that bombs fall and soldiers march but when he asks about this he is told there is no war, and this is the beginning of how he begins to feel crazy. The chorus, if you can call it that, lets the listener see the messages he gets and the rage they provoke in any child and yet that rage and anger cannot be seen. Anger is the most unwelcome emotion in his story.

The second act begins to focus on the messages he receives and it’s a mix of the sweetness of the world he is pretending into and the acid of the messages which force his compliance. The most potent of these is ‘Stop crying, or I will give you a reason to cry.’ This message cements in him that he must endure the pain without breaking or showing how much it hurts. If he shows his pain, more pain will come and in this message is a story that his pain is not legitimate, as if these tears are fake, and he will be shown what causes real tears, threatened because of the cracks in his armor. Again the messages work to unravel his mind and make him feel insane. The footage in this part goes into the inner world, marked by the break in the mirror when the rage he keeps hidden builds enough force to shatter the image he has of himself as perfect and good. He picks up the broken pieces of glass and begins a journey to assemble them into a mask. He begins to walk on a journey which is really happening deep within his soul where he takes the venom, the rage, the hatred and attempts to lock this part within a cage and uses the shattered mirror shards that his rage created to perfect a mask where he can reflect back to those who gaze at him whatever they wish to see vs him having any identity at all. He punishes himself in this way for his inability to comply, to get it right, for letting anger boil. The problem here of course is that this hatred is now left, alone in the dark to fester and only dark things come from the abandoned parts of ourselves that we locked in the deep rooms in the cages we forgot.

Tell us some of the behind the scenes from the video—what are some of those moments fans don’t get to see but that were an integral part of the experience?

When we first filmed the scene when he walks slowly to the cage and pulls the door closed and hangs his head, you could hear a pin drop in the room and could feel the emotional power that the little boy and the scene held for everyone there. I make up they could see themselves for a moment and the parts that they had long forgotten came out. That was the magic I was hoping for when I made the video, to let it connect to the parts of us we left behind and in that scene the crew could feel it and I knew we were on to something.

We also had quite a problem with the glass mask, as the director was extremely nervous about any possible dangers of a child wearing this mask made of shards of glass (which is understandable). It took me a bit to help him understand that each piece was sanded carefully so none of them were sharp and it was very safe. We took turns all wearing the mask including the boy’s mom until everyone was satisfied as to the safety of the mask. I was having one of those creative moments where I was explaining that no, some random Venetian mask would not work at all here and this glass mask which I had specially made for this was critical. I could very much respect the concern for safety but it took us a minute for everyone to get comfortable.

One thing I’ve always loved about music videos is how they can add so much depth to an already great track, and I think that’s really the case here. How do you see the video enhancing the message of the song, and what do you want viewers to take away from this video?

I think this song is hard to really understand unless you have been hurt and perhaps even severely hurt by those who were supposed to love you, even if they did not intend to. The video I think unlocks much of the mystery of the song and gives the layers and the depth that would otherwise potentially be missed. I found music too often fell into a few categories, love songs, breakup songs, fun/dance songs and then a lot of others across a smattering of categories, but I found precious little music really touched on the most important relationship of all, the one we have with ourselves. And as we all begin to walk that road, I think this song needed the visual to help unlock the story of these lost parts, in particular to see the cage and the willingness we each have had to lock ourselves away in those spaces to try to hide the parts that felt so unacceptable.

I think things like the light at the end too, just cannot be shown in music. The song ends with this intense focused ray of light which comes out of nowhere and hits the child right in his heart. This is the symbol that he in fact was not left here, that even in the darkest of places, there is light, there is something of a real God beyond religion that can reach into any forgotten room and burn through the blackness to find the true heart, the true pieces and to allow the rage and anger, where others might be afraid and there can be reclamation.

How did you decide to choose this track (rather than others) off your upcoming album, All That Should Have Been, to create a music video for?

I am not sure that this will be the most popular track from the album as it’s difficult to initially comprehend, but to me it’s one of the most powerful and beautiful and over time might deepens with each listen. For me New Jerusalem is the apex of the story that the first 4 songs hint at, it’s the first song where you see the world the child lives in which is analogized as a ‘Show’ in previous tracks but here you really see it exactly as it is and so for me I always knew this was the track I had to work the hardest on. Also, I will say, I wrote this album to help my own healing journey, and this video was incredibly cathartic. I would stop while editing and just sit and cry for a while and then when it had passed come back to working on it. I don’t think I have ever worked on something so deeply anchored in my own body as this so I needed to tell this story visually as a gift to my little boy, to the parts of me locked away in the dark. I needed him to know his story was worth telling. This track is unique on the album in this regard, it’s the closest to the most vulnerable parts.

Speaking of your album, “All That Should Have Been,” is a massive 17-song concept album. That’s insane! Can you give us a sneak peek into the overall storyline and what inspired it?

Thank you for asking! It begins with this scene backstage at a circus, where you get introduced to this world where this child who is talented and capable is forced to perform in this epic show that is happening. Slowly, the listener begins to assemble the pieces of the story, where you meet the circus master obsessed with his own glory at the expense of all else and then the album turns and begins to dive into the child’s mind beginning with ‘Mother’ which starts to bring the dynamics that circus only hints at forward. The child who cannot get his needs met is forced to ask ‘Why?’ in this song and no child can comprehend that a caregiver is the problem, instead they take it upon themselves, and imagine they must deserve what is happening or if only they were more in some way, then they would be loved. Thus begins the lifelong struggle to be ‘enough’. Fear speaks to the terror of being alone as a small child and works to really connect those feelings I had of laying alone in bed with so many nightmares that would not stop and that awful realization that no one was coming and there was no one to go to. All of this builds the tension through New Jerusalem and Confusion which tell the story of what happened and then the boys desperate quest to find numbness and the cost of that numbness. The ego develops more with ‘Control’ and the boy begins to make a deal with the darker parts of himself to survive. ‘Heartland’ brings more to the story telling of his love for his sibling he grew up with and the experience they both shared.

The album just continues to go deeper into addiction and trauma and the prisons we create to keep ourselves safe but at such incredible costs. The latter half of the album is where hope begins to emerge, healing and light start to come alive and his own children are introduced into the story and the work he has done begins to pay off in the harm they are spared from. The overall journey is about how our egos form, what they do and the messages they hold and finally the journey to love these abandoned parts of ourselves, to see them not as monsters but as children in monster clothing. The last track of the album is one of my favorites but is arguably the weirdest track as it takes one of the most beautiful tracks of the album ‘Where Do We Go From Here’ and has this other voice come over it which just destroys the song but in the end that voice is welcomed and invited to sing together with the other voice. This is the whole message of the album: there are no demons within, only lost children, who have been left alone far too long and now need to be held, embraced and witnessed so that they can grow in the ways they never were allowed to. That is the fundamental hope of the story.

Are there any concept albums you love that were part of the inspiration for this?

Oh for sure. I mean ‘The Wall’ was one of the first times I realized music can be anything we want and can tell these incredible stories without being a musical. Like exceptional songs can be housed in larger frameworks that deepen their meaning beyond the first listen. ‘The Downward Spiral’ is another one which touched that autobiographical intimacy with driving dark music that had a kind of authenticity that was dreadful and beautiful and held a poignancy that I had never heard elsewhere. It would be deeper into the project that I started to more intentionally dive into worlds like ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust’ and ‘Lamb Lies Down on a Broadway’ from Genesis and see how many had gone on this journey before me. It felt risky to lead with a concept album but I made a decision at some point to just let whatever was right come forward from within without ever trying to shape it to be more commercially viable and that would land however it landed.

Finally, what’s next for Night Wilds? Any exciting plans or projects you can give us a sneak peek of?

My dream right now is to create more and more of the visual worlds that pair with the music. If I could I would love to make a music video for every song but its not financially viable to do so. That’s been taking a lot of my time though, creating more and more of the world the music is housed in. All that being said, I start to feel more and more of the spark begin again to start writing and have begun to piece together ideas for the next album already. Once we drop the album in the spring I think we will already be working on the next one and teasing some singles from that album. It’s been so incredibly powerful and rewarding to see the music connect with people, sometimes without them quite even knowing why, that has fueled a lot of inspiration for the next round. One thing I know, my favorite musicians have built lifelong careers and that is my hope, to create the kind of music that I can still be doing 20 years from now, so Night Wilds is just beginning.

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