El Paso, Elsewhere is bursting on the seams with werewolves, vampires, and “extra slow-motion dives than you’d suppose it’s humanly potential to suit right into a single online game”. Now, the upcoming third-person shooter can add an animated music video to its checklist, with the discharge of an animated music video for the sport’s authentic monitor ”Keep Awake’.

If you recognize developer Unusual Scaffold‘s founder, Xalavier Nelson Jr, this music video received’t come as an entire shock. Neither will the truth that Nelson Jr is on vocals, all whereas engaged on the remainder of the sport. The prolific developer has an exhaustive artistic properly: when he’s not making an 11-track rap album for El Paso, Elsewhere, he’s making a game about bank-robbing animals, or the aptly-titled House Warlord Organ Buying and selling Simulator, which does precisely what it says on the spleen.

Chatting with NME, Nelson Jr explains that the objective for El Paso, Elsewhere‘s soundtrack was to seize a way of “existential violence,” apt for a supernatural neo-noir shooter. However three years in the past, Nelson Jr and long-time Unusual Scaffold collaborator RJ Lake had been hitting a “baffling” wall: none of their makes an attempt at capturing “existential violence” had been panning out, till the pair realised that vocals had been too necessary to overlook.

“I feel I actually stated ‘Oh shit, we’re gonna should make a rap album,’” says Nelson. “We each laughed, as a result of we didn’t absolutely realise the implications of that occasion. Right here we’re three years later, with an 11-track rap album — this has gone a lot additional than we ever anticipated it wanted to go!”

This isn’t Nelson Jr’s first foray into music. The developer has contributed songs, rap and spoken phrase poetry to earlier video games, however ‘Keep Awake’ and the broader El Paso, Elsewhere soundtrack is a serious step up.

“If we had been going to have needle drops on this online game, I needed it to be good — or higher — than if we had bought music,” explains Nelson Jr, who says making a rap album and a sport concurrently is like juggling chainsaws whereas finding out for medical college

On the music video for ‘Keep Awake’, Nelson Jr labored with Demente Animation Studio to hammer dwelling a theme that’s been with El Paso, Elsewhere since its inception. “Villainy and violence are difficult,” he says, “and the nearer you get to this factor that’s attempting to destroy you, it’s typically attempting to get nearer to you as properly.”

Test it out under:

The highway to creating ‘Keep Awake’ has been tough, and Nelson Jr admits he’d “by no means advocate” anybody else tries to comply with in his chainsaw-juggling footsteps. But the result’s, in Nelson Jr’s phrases, one thing “actually particular” — a soundtrack each bit as distinctive and from-the-heart as El Paso, Elsewhere units out to be.

“It’s been a deeply difficult course of, but in addition one of the crucial rewarding of my profession,” says Nelson Jr. “I wouldn’t commerce it for something.”

El Paso, Elsewhere launches later this yr, and you may wishlist it right here.