With latest single “Shallow”, Animals in Denial, the project of singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Christian Imes, delivers not just a song but a psychological plunge into one of the darkest corners of human connection.

Now paired with a new video directed by Jon Paul Anderson, “Shallow” becomes even more unsettling. This is a visceral, first person descent into the claustrophobic mindset of someone who knows they’re trapped in a toxic relationship but can’t break free yet.

Watch the Official Music Video to “Shallow”:

The song itself is already brutal in its honesty.

Written in real time during a destructive relationship, “Shallow” documents the push and pull between devotion and betrayal, intimacy and abandonment. Its chorus – “Lies, obsession, violent extinction” – is like a mantra muttered in disbelief, the words of someone trying to process the impossible: how love can coexist with such extreme manipulation.

Musically, it lives in that shadowy space between Depeche Mode’s Violator, Nine Inch Nails’s Pretty Hate Machine and the raw edges of Smashing Pumpkins’ Gish. The sound is heavy and suffocating, like being sealed inside a submerged tunnel with no clear way out.

Anderson’s video amplifies all of that. It is shot with a frenetic, fractured energy, and it positions the viewer as if they were inside Ines’s head, stumbling through flashes of intimacy, paranoia and suffocating obsession.

The first person perspective is unnerving, putting you in the uncomfortable position of experiencing the relationship from the inside. Not as a spectator, but as the victim.

Quick, jagged cuts create a sense of instability, while eerie moments of stillness hint at the isolation and loneliness Ines was truly experiencing at the time.

What makes this music video so effective is its refusal to tell a tidy story. It very much mirrors the chaos of memory itself. Memory as fragmented, unreliable, and lurching between moments of euphoria and despair. It’s the same hot and cold emotional whiplash that defined the relationship – one moment feeling indestructible together, the next realizing that you are completely alone.

The collaboration between Ines and Anderson is key here.

Anderson, whose past work includes a striking reinterpretation of Nine Inch Nails’ Vessel, clearly understands how to translate sound into atmosphere. Here he channels the claustrophobic intensity of Shallow into visuals that feel like a nightmare replaying itself on a loop.

The result is a music video that expands the track. It forces the listener to live inside the song’s haunted architecture.

“Shallow” is not an easy watch, nor is it meant to be. It’s messy, disorienting, and deeply human. It’s a work that acknowledges how love can become a trap, and how survival sometimes comes only after you’ve been broken down completely.

Animals in Denial’s offers something powerful. In “Shallow”, it refuses to turn the other way.

About Animals In Denial

Animals in Denial is the project of singer songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Christian Imes, who blends industrial textures, alternative rock grit and raw lyrics into deeply immersive soundscapes.

Influenced by Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and the Smashing Pumpkins, Imes transforms personal experiences often marked by intensity, vulnerability and survival, into music that is unflinchingly human.

With latest release “Shallow”, this stands as one of his most personal works, pairing brutal honesty with a haunting and atmospheric production.

Keep up to date with Animals in Denial on the Website

Stream “Shallow” on Spotify now!