‘No Skin Against the Wind’ is a narrative music video from multidisciplinary artist Wrené Nova (known musically as Wrené), released as a precursor to her forthcoming full-length album The Intangible. Inspired by – and at times directly recreating scenes from – films such as Candy and Beautiful Boy, the video confronts not only the brutal realities of heroin addiction, but the wider struggles of human fragility. While weaving in themes of transformation, faith, and the internal tension between light and darkness, it also meditates on the delicate balance between our dependence on harmful escapes and the resilience it takes to overcome them.

For Wrené, the story is deeply personal. Faith has often felt less like a gift than an impossible summit — a struggle shared by many who move through the world with raw sensitivity. Here, faith is not portrayed as a surface-level message to “just believe,” but as an individual, often grueling climb that can take many forms outside of religion. Within the narrative, the figure of the heroin user becomes both a mirror of society’s cruelty toward the open-hearted and a haunting glimpse of one path Wrené herself could have taken. “Too often, people are medicated or numbed just to exist, to be manageable, to conform,” she explains, “but No skin against the wind is about that deep susceptibility – the feeling of having no protection, feeling like you have no skin against the elements of the world. And it’s okay to feel that deeply. There is a place here for me, and a place here for you.”

The title itself reflects this image: a state of exposure, of frayed edges and a fragile nervous system. The opening lyric – “Cradle me, I’ve lost my leaves” -embodies the core of the story: not addiction as weakness or resilience, but the vulnerability of feeling deeply in a world that rarely makes space for it. The film shows one angle of this condition, offering viewers empathy, recognition, and the possibility of   transformation. Musically, ‘No Skin Against the Wind’ refuses to sit neatly inside a genre. While rooted in alternative and experimental influences, the track exists as part of a larger world that unites sound, story, and visuals into a single cathartic experience — equal parts music video, art film, and a microcosm into something much deeper.