Video premiere: Of Mice & Men's 'Feels Like Forever'

Of Mice & Men's video for Feels Like Forever, premiering at USA TODAY, really does feel like the song coming to life on the screen.

Between the time-lapse night-sky photography and the water-soaked settings, director Nathan William conveys the struggle going on in the Southern California metal band's new single.

"The song is about an internal battle and feeling like everything is crashing down on you, it's raining down on you, drowning you," says singer Austin Carlile, who calls Feels Like Forever his favorite song on the band's latest album, Restoring Force. "It's a song that we want to empower people to know that everybody goes through storms, everybody goes through trials and tribulations. It's the focus of how to get out of it, how to better yourself from it, how to learn from it so it doesn't happen again. Then, if it does happen again, you know exactly how to handle it."

The band shot the video near its home, with the indoor set-up taking place in a studio where giant fans blew water on the band and Carlile shooting his beach scenes in Malibu, Calif.

"It's a spot we usually go to hang out or surf," he says. "That was really important to us. We're proud to be from Southern California, and we've never really had the opportunity to show that in any of our material. So it's not just a beach shot, it's our beach."

The shell in the video's final shot is the same shell on the cover of Restoring Force, which debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard albums chart when it came out in January, the best chart showing of the band's career.

"The idea behind the shell came from a whole line of things," Carlile says. For one thing, the shell resembles the inner ear, the source of equilibrium. Also, "Restoring force is talked about in Hooke's Law, which is about the ability of a spring to be pushed down and push back, the restoring force of the spring.

"Restoring force is returning to center, returning to your equilibrium, returning to that center after a trial or a tribulation, a storm or a flood. That's what this record was for us. It was a restoring force for our band, and we wanted it to be a restoring force for the people who listened to it."

Starting next month, Of Mice & Men will open a European arena tour for Linkin Park. Carlile said it's one of the bands that got the members of Of Mice & Men interested in music.

It's one of my favorite bands, and it's been one of my favorite bands since I was 14 years old," he says. "It's cool to be able to call them peers and to be with people that got us into music. We're excited to be able to show them what Of Mice & Men does."

Update: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the video's director. His name is Nathan William.