There’s a moment in every transformation when the mask stops fitting — when the persona you’ve held onto begins to sag at the edges, heavy with the weight of who you no longer are. Identity doesn’t crack all at once; it loosens in quiet rooms, in long drives, in the stillness between breaths. For Los Angeles-based artist MANIKVAMP, that moment becomes a reckoning in her latest video, My Mind Is Made Up. Here, the shifting of identity — its molting, its shedding, its rebirth — takes center stage as the next part of her Dead & Buried EP drags a different truth into the light.
A key turning point of this closing chapter, “My Mind Is Made Up,” crackles with dark alt-rock tension. It opens on an arpeggiated synth pulse before giving way to a slightly psychedelic guitar riff — a sound that nods to the ragged glory of early Hole and the low-end bruising of L7’s Bricks Are Heavy era. The vocals begin with a quick, tightly delivered cadence, almost percussive in their urgency, before shifting into longer, more drawn-out, dark alt-rock lines that feel deliberate, sharpened, and heavy with resolve. The bass chugs like a restless engine underneath, giving the whole track the momentum of a decision that can no longer be delayed.
Directed and edited by Gnarlos Wright, the video for “My Mind Is Made Up” opens on MANIKVAMP driving in the cold daylight, shaking her head as if trying to dislodge a thought she can no longer ignore. With her trademark punk-goth vamp look — cigarette burning between her fingers, eyeliner like war paint — she pulls up to a grand Victorian mansion layered with ghosts, antiques, and haunted velvet. It is not a ruin; it is a reliquary. Oil portraits stare from the walls. Heavy drapery holds secrets. Lamps flicker like faint memories. Stepping out of the car, she stands at the threshold like someone arriving at the house of an old self she has come to bury.
Inside, the camera lingers on intricate woodwork, tasseled lamps, ornate mirrors, and the lush theatricality of distressed goth glamour — somewhere between Rasputina’s cello-haunted Victoriana and Tim Burton’s shadow-soaked whimsy. MANIKVAMP moves through the rooms like a decaying Victorian vampire, not collapsing but shedding — pacing corridors as if each antique were an echo of the persona she is preparing to leave behind. Her presence disrupts the stillness. The walls seem to watch. Identity hangs in the air like dust.
Then, as the track deepens, masked figures begin to appear — slipping through doorframes, emerging behind banisters, flickering at the edges of lamplight. Their presence evokes the quiet dread of The Strangers, but here they function as something more symbolic: iterations of the self, expectations from the past, pressures from the scene, shadows of the persona being hunted down from the inside. They are the many faces of MANIKVAMP’s own creation, now closing in.
The tension between sound and setting becomes the axis on which the whole video turns. The gritty alt-rock churn pushes forward with the determination of someone finally committing to change, while the opulent interior wraps around her like the last luxurious trap of an identity she no longer wishes to inhabit. She is both the ghost and the hunter, both the past and the future, both the persona and the executioner. The title is not a metaphor. Her mind is made up.
In Dead & Buried’s architecture, “My Mind Is Made Up” marks the moment when the decision crystallizes. If “Silent Screams” captured isolation and overwhelm, and “Quiet My Mind” mapped the claustrophobia of internal noise, then this is where the exit appears — where she stops pleading for quiet and instead chooses to dismantle the persona entirely. The masked hunters, the mansion, the cigarette glow, the moving shadows: all of it points toward the inevitable third act, in which she does what they cannot — kill the character herself.
Watch the video for “My Mind Is Made Up” below:
On Dead & Buried, MANIKVAMP stages a funeral for the self she no longer wishes to inhabit. Composed with longtime collaborator Scotty from Wisconsin, the EP moves through the burial ritual one track at a time, preparing not just an end but a deliberate rebirth. “It represents a funeral… the symbolic burial of the MANIKVAMP character and everything she stood for,” she explains. “I realized I had outgrown that version of myself and needed to put it to rest to move forward.”
Across the EP, each song serves its role:
“Silent Screams” — the overwhelm, the suffocation, the swallowing of the persona.
“Quiet My Mind” — the impossible plea for silence amid expectation and noise.
“My Mind Is Made Up” — the turning point, the decision, the realization that escape must be chosen, not granted.
“Dead & Buried” — the execution, the burial, the emergence of something new.
This is not a rebrand. It is a self-chosen extinction. A controlled burn. A ritual closure for a persona born from survival and sharpened by pain. “While it started as a way to own my mental illnesses, it eventually began to glorify them,” she admits. The new name — still unrevealed — will be the opposite of MANIKVAMP, the person who steps out of the coffin rebuilt, refocused, and aligned with healing rather than survival.
“No matter how out of control your life gets, you can always find your way back to yourself and reinvent yourself,” she says. “Every ending comes with a new beginning.”
The MANIKVAMP era is nearly buried. The person who rises afterward is already sharpening the blade.
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