Sitting with Nita Aviance and Will Automagic, the two DJs who make up The Carry Nation, I try to explain exactly why I love the video for their new track “As If.” The video feels both familiar and otherworldly—I recognize a few friendly faces from my own blurry nights out. These faces both grin and confront unsmilingly, though never leaving any question as to whether they’re having a fabulous time. Two masked pups wag their asses, happy on the end of a bodybuilder’s leash. His sculpted body is topped with a golden crown, the kind children wear for let’s pretend. The boy in the rabbit costume sitting on the dinner table with the carrot in his mouth looks terribly self-satisfied (everybody here does)—but it’s hard not to worry about an edible animal in a video where someone keeps fingerfucking the turkey.

The world the video imagines is “hypnotic, but with little bursts of excitement,” just as Nita describes their track—and I’d argue there are little bursts of fear too. Nita nods—he’ll allow it—and says, “Well, it should make you a little bit uncomfortable. That’s the idea of going out. You have this fantasy that you’re going to have the wildest night of your life.” In one of the video’s most captivating moments, a woman gestures playfully with a kitchen knife, almost as if it were a cigarette, awfully close to her friends’ faces. They don’t look the slightest bit alarmed. They seem to trust her.

“I remember the isolation I felt growing up,” Will says as I blunder through more questions I have about how queer nightlife makes another world. I am trying to explain something about the limits of our imagination, and how decadence can help us reach and transcend them, but it seems like it would make more sense to just go dancing. “I remember seeing this video of Dean Johnson perform this song, ‘Teri Toye,’ ” Will says, sighing. “I thought, I have to leave where I am. I have to go there, if there is that much possibility.”

After I talk to Will and Nita, I go looking for that video of Dean Johnson, New York queer nightlife legend, and I find it—but “the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated,” and it’s unwatchable. So many of the worlds we make disappear. (One hopes there are good clubs in heaven, for Dean Johnson’s sake.) On the same page where I find the video embedded, there’s a photograph of Johnson wearing his trademark little dress and sunglasses. These ones have big slanted lenses specifically designed to resemble alien’s eyes. Behind him on the wall, someone has scrawled: “THIS PLANET SUCKS.”

How do we live on this planet, since this is so demonstrably true? To paraphrase a straight guy who was married to Simone de Beauvoir, Hell may be other people, but the other world we need probably is too. As we talk, Will and Nita speak glowingly again and again of their collaborators. “We did throw everyone into the fire,” Will laughs. “Yeah, [the director, Tyler Jensen] basically sent a mood board of photos to everybody,” Nita explains. “So much of our music is really created influenced by and created for the New York City dance floor—casting it was really about showcasing the brilliant friends that we have.”

“Not everybody knew each other,” Will adds. “I really feel like no one was directed. Every single one of them has a strong personality. No one was fettered or restrained.” It’s hard to imagine trying to fetter or restrain these people on the level of personality—a pup mask or a leash, sure, but that’s only another way of being unfettered. In some of the video’s moments of greatest intensity, a kind of double exposure effect makes bodies appear to blend, evoking something Will brings up to me: “The dance floor moments when it feels like everyone is one person.”

“It’s not even a thing that you consciously try to do,” Nita says, “but it’s something that you experience, and then all you can do for the rest of your life is try to create such an experience for someone else.” Will nods emphatically. “Yes,” he says, “and every single person in that room is equally responsible.”