Natural Wonder Beauty Concept Wicked Game (2025)
Some songs just keep on getting better with every cover and interpretation. Chris Isaak’s legendary song “Wicked Game” is one of those: The 1989 original version (with Danish model Helena Christensen starring in its official music video) sounds like a sigh drifting through the wind: velvety, aching, sweet.
While Isaak sings of the pull of a love that can only end in ruin, he made a song for the ages: At first, the song went largely unnoticed, then David Lynch picked it up for his cult classic Wild at Heart (1990). Lynch used it in instrumental form as the emotional undercurrent of his feverish film. The Lynchian “Wicked Game” became a soundtrack to an eccentric love in a world that is “wild at heart and weird on top”.
Five years later, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist tore the song apart. Her video work “I’m a Victim of this Song” (1995) is both a cover and a dismantling. While Isaak’s version is sung by a male voice, Rist performs it herself, occasionally screaming the lyrics over her gentle singing, creating a jarring contrast. The images are fractured: a café, drifting clouds, blurred camera movements, zoomed-in lampshades mirroring their surroundings. The slightly indistinct visuals hold an almost accidental poetry, suddenly disrupted by the artist’s hysterical voice. No wonder her version can confuse listeners outside the art context—for instance, when it appears on Spotify’s Discover page, where the sudden screams hit without warning. Reddit user Monkjob wrote: “What is with the shouting in the background? Ruins the entire song […]”
Next to Rist’s radical take the song has been covered many times, most recently by the American artist duo Natural Wonder Beauty Concept consisting of experimental musician and singer Ana Roxanne and DJ and producer Brian Piñeyro aka DJ Python. Where Isaak gave us doomed yet sentimental romance and Rist revealed its hysteria, Natural Wonder Beauty Concept dissolve the song into vapor. Their version is electronic, heavy-breathed, pulsing from the depths yet strangely weightless. Roxanne’s voice drifts like fog, stretched across a subterranean bass; and by the time the 4:22 minutes are up, all that remains is to let it wash over you once more.
“Wicked Game” has lived many lives, maybe making it the most realistic love ballad of all: from fatal attraction to Helena Christensen on the beach to hysteria and unraveling and finally something spectral—a ghost story, returning in new forms again and again.
Dig Deeper
The film follows Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern), two young lovers fleeing across the American South to escape Lula’s controlling mother, Marietta (Diane Ladd), who will stop at nothing to keep them apart. Their journey turns into a surreal, often violent road trip, filled with eccentric and menacing characters—Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru among them—strange encounters and dark comedy. Lynch blends grotesque Americana with dreamlike symbolism. Amid the chaos of murder plots, car chases and bizarre roadside spectacles, the film celebrates the stubborn, sometimes reckless persistence of love.
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