What to know | Cece Natalie's New Song "Flood Whole Towns" MV: She Kills Herself Off, Refuses to Be the Hero of Her Own Story

This time, Cece Natalie doesn't make it to the end of the video alive. The visual for her new single "Flood Whole Towns," directed by Hannah De Vries, closes with her character dying. "I wanted to build a story where I die at the end," she told The FADER. "I didn't want to be the hero this time. There are no heroes here."

That line lands with extra clarity given Cece Natalie's recent trajectory. She dropped an eight-track EP in late 2025, opened for PinkPantheress on tour this spring to a mixed reception, and followed it up with the single "DOMINO." Her dark-pop aesthetic keeps sharpening into focus, sitting somewhere between Tinashe's Amethyst era and Lana Del Rey's "Summer Bummer" period — and "Flood Whole Towns" is the latest marker on that line.

The lyrics trace a relationship that friends might call, at best, codependent and, at worst, toxic: "I defend you with my life, they just wanna protect me / the bad aftertaste in all their mouths, I L-O-V-E-E." Cece Natalie's songs keep circling the same thing — how emotion and attraction push people into their worst selves, and how that pain can be more addictive than the problem itself. On "DOMINO" she sang "I'm coming for your blood"; this time, "Flood Whole Towns" leaves behind what she calls her favorite line: "the cross that I bear is the clutter inside." She says she's not even sure how that line came out, only that it was pulled from a diary entry where she let herself go off the rails.

The track was completed by Cece Natalie and co-producer Aaron Shadrow. She describes the different elements in the arrangement as sounding like they're from different eras: "The more I say 'I blame you' in the outro, the more off-pitch it gets." She also explained why the song is almost entirely free of Autotune: "It would've made it too pretty, too modern. I like some lines to sound straightforward and others to feel medieval."

Cece Natalie also co-created the visual concept. She says this was finally the project that let her pull together elements she'd always wanted in her visual world — fantasy, adventure, death. Director Hannah De Vries, who previously directed her "Exitin" video, this time drew reference points from Nosferatu and the atmosphere of the Salem witch trials, flipping through Grimm's fairy tales before landing on a Rumpelstiltskin-style fable structure. De Vries describes Cece Natalie as having "an unapologetic rawness — that's her superpower, and it's her charm."

Behind-the-scenes photos shot on set by photographers Max Wright and Baylee Bennett were released alongside the interview, with Cece Natalie adding her own captions to each one — in a tone completely at odds with the song's darkness. She mentioned having to look up online how to use a "hundred-year-old colonial spinning wheel," joked about how much it hurt to get hay in her eyes, and noted this was the first time she'd handed makeup entirely over to someone else: "At least now I don't look like a mess." The crew had originally hoped to shoot at a Masonic lodge, but the rental quote was absurdly expensive, so they ended up shooting in an old house instead.