Imagine a moth dance: a velvet bug fluttering around a candle in a dark room. The eyespots on her wings blink as she hovers with the candle flame—a waltz of restraint, before she inevitably succumbs to her darkest impulses, breaking step and crashing into the flame.

Zsela’s Moth Dance, the penultimate song from her debut album Big For You, is just as elegant. The track is a slow burn. A hymn breathing drawn-out breaths in a poetic cadence, it withholds before it spills into a declaration of life: “I’m alive. I’m alive. I’m alive.” But her dance is an anti-swan song. “It was the first song I wrote for the album,” Zsela told Document. “Moth Dance always represented the home of the project that we left to experiment on with other songs. How they related back to Moth Dance was always the challenge that made it fun.”

Yesterday, Zsela premiered her Moth Dance music video, directed by Barbara Anastacio. In it, we watch Zsela in the intimacy of her dressing room, locking eyes with us as she psychs herself up before showtime. Then we trail her as she marches towards a stage, solemn and unhurried, through the aisles of a near-empty theatre, like Joan of Arc to her pyre. The video’s cathartic climax unfolds underneath the pulses of a strobe light, with Zsela spreading diaphanous wings sprouted from her dress.

Debuting nine months after Big For You’s release in June 2024, the music video serves as a full-circle culmination for this chapter of Zsela’s career. Inspired by Cassavetes’s 1977 film Opening Night, a film where an actress has an alcohol-fuelled breakdown in her dressing room, the video was shot at the New Hollywood Theatre in Los Angeles. The album’s sumptuous cover was photographed in the same location. “The theatre is this huge, exciting new development in our community [in LA],” she explained. “This felt like the closing of a chapter, and it’s so cool that we got to do it in this theater again.”

The project was a true labor of love, involving (almost literal) blood, sweat, and tears. “Everything you see on the video is on a sprained ankle,” Zsela shared. “On the first shot of the day, I sprained my ankle running full speed in Rick Owens no-heel boots.”

“To get to make this video for this song was really like a gift to me. But also a nice offering.”

Keep your ears sharp for the guitar solo at the song’s end. That’s the sound of Zsela playing the guitar with her teeth.