Singer, writer, and rapper Dessa shared the video for her dexterous new single “Talking Business,” The fifth release in her IDES series, dropping new tracks on the 15th of every month. The sprawling track is dramatic at ever turn, as the imagery throughout lingers even after the song comes to a close.

“I wanted to make a song that unfolded like a little film where the plot was revealed in a series of objects and still images,” Dessa explains. “I envisioned lipstick on the filter of a cigarette, a wig discarded in a hotel bathtub—all the action implied, just off-screen. I tinkered with the idea for years, but never quite got it running until I heard the beat from Michael Piroli—slinky and smoky with a little menace. To try to build a story in a flash of snapshots, I wrote the song without using any verbs. So the song unfurls with just a list, really: an inventory of telling items and a few frames of character frozen in a single moment. (And, for the ‘word nerdz’ eager to bust me—terms like ‘talk’ are used here as verbal nouns and the -ing words, like ‘missing’, are actually gerunds, a type of noun.)”