It’s hard not to want to center a music video around the emblematic locations of Puerto Rico: there’s a seemingly endless selection of stunning natural landscapes, plus a wealth of eye-catching backdrops in locales from lively, colorful chinchorros to the hundreds of historic Spanish colonial structures.
Those motifs are too striking to ever be tiresome, but when Ferdy Valls brainstormed the latest clip for Los Wálters, he wanted a new challenge — to work within the constraints of a single, bare room — in hopes of achieving a fresh result. In “Más de Nadie,” premiering today on Remezcla, we see the perfect reflection of Los Wálters’ signature sound: The vaporwave-style aesthetics solidly echo the synth-pop they’ve pursued for years, and the traditional rhythms they embed ever-so-subtly are drawn out by a waxy, green palm leaf and shots of fluorescent-hued flowers.
“The video came from this retro vision that I had for the song,” Valls says.
Tube TVs, now so bulky and gigantic in our flat-screen modern day, are either patterned with static or feature the duo, Luis López and Ángel Emanuel Figueroa, singing with generally stoic expressions. When the guitar solo rolls in, though, Figueroa is smiling, balloons flying around him, vibrant and flashing with static. It’s not an overly joyful bit, but in the casual gait of the tune, it injects a modicum of momentary elation.
Valls has worked on previous Los Wálters projects, including the editing on “Porsche” — a video driven by its main character, but that makes rich use of some iconic Puerto Rican imagery, too.
For this pared-down approach, the actress Cenit Nadir is intentionally centered throughout. “Más de Nadie’ roughly translates to ‘I want from no one else,’ so I wanted to have a model or a person in this completely vacant place,” he explains.
Valls, who plays keys in Los Wálters’ live shows and also helms his own synth project, embellished the empty space with retro effects — so many that it had to be streamlined in post, he says. “[The video] was actually made in March I think, and basically, it’s a visual effects-heavy video, so it took longer to edit. Basically everything that you see in that video, there’s visual effects hidden in there,” he says.
It’s as complex a makeup as Los Wálters’ sound — there’s so many elements you could extract, but the blend is so much a harmonious hegemony that you’d really rather leave it be, perfectly whole, as it is.
“Más de Nadie” is from Los Wálters’ Isla Disco, out now. Watch our premiere of the video above.