By Jon Blistein
Doechii confronts all those internal fears, apprehensions, and stressors, in all their mundane and outrageous forms, in the new video for “Anxiety.”
Directed by James Mackel, the elaborate video begins simply enough, with the Florida rapper strolling through a grand home with an attentive staff. Then all those pesky, well, anxieties come crashing in — just like the SWAT team that repeatedly breaks through the living room windows.
The camera follows Doechii as she stumbles around and tries to make sense of the chaos, which includes everything from a stove fire to lifeless house guests, a mean-looking dog, a gigantic elephant, a falling chandelier, and a massive troupe of dancers. There are even two lookalikes of Gotye and Kimbra, a nod to the sample of their hit, “Somebody That I Used to Know” that anchors “Anxiety.”
Doechii officially released “Anxiety” in March, though the song has actually been floating around online for years. It was originally self-released on YouTube in 2019, but at the time, she wasn’t able to properly release and monetize the song because she wasn’t able to properly clear the “Somebody That I Used to Know” sample.
Still, the song remained a deep cut hit: The rapper Sleepy Hallow sampled it on a 2023 song, and more recently, it started gaining traction on TikTok. The latter was fueled in particular by a dance craze that blew up after the song was paired with an old Fresh Prince of Bel-Air clip (Doechii, Will Smith, and Tatyana Ali recently recreated the scene themselves).
Since its official release, “Anxiety” has become Doechii’s biggest single to date, recently peaking at Number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song arrives on the heels of Doechii’s breakthrough 2024 album, Alligator Bites Never Heal, which recently won the Grammy for Best Rap Album.
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