Since its first appearance in Cyberpunk 2077, “Night City” has become one of those songs that seem to generate their own universe. R E L wrote it as one of three demos for a project she knew only by a code name, working alongside her longtime collaborator Billy Burke.
What began as a quick idea became a turning point. The song was selected for the in-game pop radio station and later featured in a trailer that unexpectedly brought R E L’s music to a global audience.
“Night City” explores the tension between danger and desire, a central theme of the cyberpunk universe. The lyrics open with a surreal sunrise, “Good morning, high city/A day in the life,” placing the listener inside a fast-moving urban landscape filled with nocturnal energy and bodies in motion. In the lyrics, R E L captures the hypnotic pull of a space that is both seductive and threatening, a duality that becomes part of the track’s emotional DNA.
R E L by Bri Diez coming through the veilFor the game’s fifth anniversary, R E L returned to that world to create the definitive video that the song had long been calling for. She worked with creative technologist Ran Bensimon, known for scanning identities and emotions through advanced digital processes. Alongside photographer Boris Haimov, they completed a full scan of R E L in Haifa to build her Metahuman and begin exploratory work in Unreal Engine, translating the song’s internal imagery into a futuristic visual aesthetic.
The project was paused until, in an almost narrative twist, R E L found herself with what is essentially a bionic leg, a detail that unexpectedly aligned with the identity of the video. As she explains, “Receiving this hyper-digital, identity-shifting version of myself during a moment of personal evolution felt symbolic, a mirror, a message, and a threshold.”
The resulting visual merges traditional 3D worlds with AI models trained on her likeness. It blends photogrammetry, digital environments designed by Mantrastic, and animations created with tools like Flux, Nano Banana, and image-to-video processes. On screen, R E L moves through multiple iterations of herself: human, hybrid, and mythic.
Conceptually, “Night City” circles back to identity as perpetual motion, one of R E L’s core themes. She recently explored it in songs like “Robot,” contrasting emotional disconnection with the decision to feel. The video’s release marks the beginning of a new creative cycle. R E L is preparing “Artemis Delta,” an EP inspired by cyberpunk aesthetics that expands the emotional narrative of “Night City.”
R E L by Bri DiezShe is also moving forward with “EVOCAPOP Side B,” the next album in her trilogy, and developing a collaborative project with Rhye that opens a more ethereal dimension within her artistic identity. Additionally, she will contribute an original song to the soundtrack for the new “Ecco the Dolphin,” out in 2026.
