Rylai’s melancholy new music video “Issues” is a breathtakingly intimate picture of heartbreak that feels less like a story being told and more like an emotional condition we are softly put into. What you get is not merely a work about sorrow, but one that breathes it, that makes it linger, that makes it reverberate long after the final frame has faded.
“Issues” is about the sadness of a love falling to pieces. Rylai’s voice sounds like someone attempting, and failing, to move on after a relationship has imploded beneath the weight of its own emotional detritus. His speech is sensitive but yet fractured, like a heart that’s still beating but not quite in sync with itself. His craving swells and ebbs with the song like the waves smashing on an indifferent shore, each swell dragging him back into remembrance, each ebb leaving him more powerless to the silence that follows.
It's the emotional contrast that makes the song so poignant. As he mourns the end of a relationship, there’s a creeping knowledge threaded through the performance, the disturbing prospect that he might never have completely known the person he loved. That ambiguity makes it worse, turning sadness into something even more confusing, an emotional limbo where certainty is lost.
The music video for “Issues” translates this inward instability visually outward into the world around him. Rylai wanders through some of New York’s loneliest landscapes not as a grounded figure of the city, but as something closer to a ghost circulating through its veins. The city's wide-open spaces only deepen his loneliness. He seems frozen in spaces, locked in a psychological drift that parallels the song’s own emotional imbalance, between clinging on and letting go, between memory and reality, between who he was in love and who he is without it. His ethereal voice heightens this sense of dislocation, emitting an immediate, unguarded openness. There is a kind of troubled beauty in everything being a little out of true, as if the world around him no longer fits his inner state.
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