Cece Natalie in the video for "Flood Whole Towns."
via the artist
Cece Natalie has been on a serious run since The FADER caught up with the producer-popstar backstage at Elsewhere last fall. Following an 8 song EP of loosies at the end of 2025, she went on tour this spring with PinkPantheress, and dropped a seriously bomb new single “DOMINO.” Despite mixed reactions to her opening slot for Pink, it’s clear that Cece has been dialing in the dark aesthetic of her throbbing alt-pop, which sits somewhere between Amethyst-era Tinashe and “Summer Bummer” Lana Del Rey.
Her latest single “Flood Whole Towns” sketches an impressionist portrait of a thorny relationship, the sort that your friends might call codependent at best and toxic at worst. “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’s music is preoccupied with this sort of bittersweetness, the ways that affection and attraction can bring out the worst in ourselves and our lovers, and how we might find that pain more pleasurable than problematic. I think of the frequently misunderstood lyrics to her early hit “Ambulance,” or how she warns, “I’m coming for your blood” on “DOMINO.” When Cece Natalie says she doesn’t want to be a typical Y2K pop princess, she means it.
Speaking exclusively to The FADER about recording “Flood Whole Towns” with co-producer Aaron Shadrow, Cece said, “Different little elements sound like they're from different time periods, to me. And I like that the outro vocals get progressively more off key the more I say ‘I blame you.’”
Cece went on to say that her vocals and lyrical approach on “Flood Whole Towns” aimed to balance those different “eras” she was hearing in the instrumental.
“There isn't a lot of Autotune on this song because it would sound too pretty and too modern,” Cece says. “I like that some lines are straightforward and others feel kinda medieval. I don't really know how I came up with ‘the cross that I bear is the clutter inside,’ but it's a top 10 favorite lyric in any song of mine. I write and record simultaneously, but I was pulling from journal entries where I give myself permission to be as irrational as I want to be.”
Cece Natalie also helped co-creative direct the treatment for the music video, saying, “I got to include some of the things that I have always wanted in my visual world, like fantasy, adventure, and death. It was really cool in a way, also, to build a story where I die at the end. I didn't want to make myself the hero of my story this time. There is no hero.”
Director Hannah De Vries, who previously directed the video for “Exitin,” said of working with Natalie, “I’m obsessed with the Cece Natalie character and myth. Mia has a rawness and unapologetic way of acting, performing, and moving that is her superpower and her charm.”
Speaking more specifically to the video treatment, De Vries added, “Mia loves Nosferatu and Salem witch trials-esque aesthetics, and so I was looking at Brothers Grimm and fable stuff… which led me to this Rumpelstiltskin moment… like who’s doing Rumpelstiltskin? No one girl.”
Watch the video for “Flood Whole Towns” above, and check out exclusive behind-the-scenes photos from the video shoot by Max Wright and Baylee Bennett.
"Had to Google how to use the 100 year old colonial spindle."
"I look so kind here."
"I wish my hair was my height in inches multiplied by 3 +50 inches."
"Something about my facial expression or my posture makes me look like I am a plastic doll."
"I trapped a spirit in the wooden toy snake."
"I had my quarantined misophonia lunch break here."
"I love rolling around in a pile of hay but it got in my eyeball and it hurt."
"This was my first time ever letting anyone do my makeup. Now I don’t look busted."
"I wanted to film at the masonic lodge but they were charging a trillion dollars and some change so we found this old house instead."
"I like this one cause my a** looks so fat."
"This one is so divorce movie."
