Fujii Kaze transforms into a 70s icon with the “Casket Girl” music video, but beneath the retro glamour lies something darker.
Director Charles Mehling, who previously worked with The Rolling Stones and Liam Gallagher, crafts a deceptively layered narrative about fame’s seductive destruction wrapped in vintage aesthetics.
The video splits between two realities. The throwback TV performance showcases Kaze as the polished celebrity, complete with a greasy late-night host, hired dancers, and studio aesthetics pulled from early-70s music programmes. This world drips with artificial glamour, the version of himself that exists for public consumption.
Meanwhile, the road trip narrative strips everything bare. Here, Kaze drives a cherry-red Ford Galaxie marked “HWY2 HELL” with two passengers who represent the war happening inside every rising star.
The quiet woman journaling in the passenger seat symbolizes stability, the grounding forces celebrities need but fame convinces them they’ve outgrown.
She drinks coffee with restraint, never demands attention, simply exists as a tether to reality.
Enter the chaotic hitchhiker who disrupts every frame he touches, eating greedily, spending recklessly, embodying the toxic thrill of fame without boundaries.
Watch Kaze physically relocate the woman to the backseat to make room for chaos, and you’re witnessing the exact moment stability loses to self-destruction.
The psychedelic breakdown hits hardest when the camera zooms erratically into the hitchhiker’s face, shifting from road movie to psychological horror. Something irreversible happens here.
The woman’s hand mimicking a gun becomes a desperate attempt to wake Kaze from his spiral. By the devastating finale, the hitchhiker vanishes with the car and everything in it, leaving only the person Kaze pushed aside, the one who actually stayed.
Sonically, “Casket Girl” serves that buttery 70s funk with surgical precision. The track clocks in around 110 BPM, built on a groovy bassline and syncopated drum patterns that recall Hall & Oates at their smoothest.
Kaze’s vocals slide across the production with sultry menace, his falsetto teasing out lyrics about gorgeous eyes being his demise and getting used up by lies.
The irresistibly danceable groove creates brilliant tension with the dark narrative, making you move while the story suffocates.
The opening track from his all-English album “Prema” proves Kaze operates on a different frequency than typical pop crossovers.
He channels New Orleans folklore about “casket girls,” young women who arrived in colonial Louisiana carrying coffin-shaped trunks, becoming symbols of beauty that drains life from those who desire it.
That mythology threads through every frame, transforming a retro music video into commentary on celebrity culture’s vampiric nature.
This visual slays precisely because it never spells out its meaning. The symbolism hides in character choices, framing decisions, and the slow collapse that starts the moment Kaze lets the wrong person into his car.
What looks like a vintage aesthetic flex reveals itself as a warning about how easily young artists drift from themselves when thrill overpowers stability.
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