Laila! Captures Youthful Romance in ‘Anything Could Happen’ Video

Laila! has curated the ultimate photo dump. Unlike the rest of us who rely on Instagram as the medium for such activities, the singer-songwriter is unloading her camera roll in the form of a music video for her new single “Anything Could Happen.”

On her self-produced song, the Brooklyn native sings sweetly about butterfly-in-the-stomach love and youth’s ephemeral opportunity of chance and exploration over soft string synths, which then evolve into break beats and EDM rhythms. In the video, which she co-directed with Daniel Desnoyers, Laila! displays the joy and freedom of obligation-free 20-year-olds between flickers of digital camera snapshots and camcorder video of beaches, bubbles, and boardwalks.

“It was filmed everywhere that I’ve kind of been the last three months. Three, four months,” Laila! tells VIBE. “It definitely felt like a summer camp, just me and my friends…it was just cool to have all those memories and look back at them and put them in this video.”

With creative control of her art, Laila!’s overall aesthetic leans heavily on the sweet nostalgia of analog living—iPods, CDs, point-and-shoot cameras—and her new era will have those same broad strokes, but with a new angle: her public and budding romance. In the “Anything Could Happen” visual, the 20-year-old musician can be seen cuddled up with her significant other on ferris wheels and taking piggyback rides on his shoulders.

“I’m a lover girl. I love love. I love writing about love. I love being in love,” she says. Even her Instagram profile picture features her beau with “Laila” shaved in the back of his head while her freshly manicured hands hold his face.

“Anything Could Happen” is Laila!’s follow-up to her last single, “Miss Mango,” and signals a new music era after her much-praised debut album Gap Year!. The buzzing artist says that though she recently released “Miss Mango,” a song about self-worth with a directive to “motherfuck that dude,” it marked her first experience of working with live musicians. “I made the beat first on my computer, and I was able to show the [session musicians] this is what y’all should do,” she says. “They were able to execute it perfectly. It was really insane. I had a great time just being able to be in that flow. I felt like [a] conductor.”

While she hasn’t released details about a new album, her singing “we’ll never be this young again” on “Anything Could Happen” shows that she’s been doing some introspection. “I’ll never be 20 years old in however many weeks, however many days, and however many seconds. That’s a trippy thought,” she says. “Today is the youngest you’ll ever be. You know that this is it. I feel like that kind of just feels hopeful to me.”