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NF drops his rawest video yet as “The Search” arrives.
On July 26, 2019, Nathan Feuerstein — known to fans as NF — released the official music video for “Leave Me Alone,” timed to the launch of his fourth studio album, The Search. The five-minute, eight-second track, issued through NF Real Music and Caroline, doubles as a confession: Feuerstein spends the runtime detailing his fight with obsessive-compulsive disorder, crushing self-doubt, and the weight of fame that landed on him after 2017’s Perception turned him into one of hip-hop’s biggest crossover names.
- The video and song were released alongside NF’s fourth studio album, The Search, on July 26, 2019.
- “Leave Me Alone” was written and produced by Feuerstein with longtime collaborators Tommee Profitt and Cole Walowac, known as Saint X of Capital Kings.
- The release coincides with the announcement of The Search Tour, a 29-date North American run opening September 12 in Pittsburgh and closing in late October in California.
The Sound and the Subject Matter
“Leave Me Alone” leans on the same production team that built NF’s sound across three prior albums. Tommee Profitt and Cole Walowac — the latter better recognized from Capital Kings under the name Saint X — helped Feuerstein craft a track that trades in hard-hitting drums and brooding synth textures rather than radio hooks. That’s deliberate. NF has never chased pop crossover the way his sales numbers might suggest; instead, “Leave Me Alone” reads as a direct address to the audience that made Perception a breakout, telling them, and himself, what the attention has actually cost him.
The lyrics don’t dance around his OCD or the intrusive thought patterns that come with it. Where earlier NF singles hinted at internal conflict through characters and metaphor, this one drops the distance. It’s Feuerstein talking about being cornered by his own mind, with the video’s visuals extending the same claustrophobic, cinematic language that’s carried the entire The Search rollout.
The track runs 5 minutes and 8 seconds — longer than almost anything else on his catalog — because Feuerstein isn’t interested in a quick chorus here. He’s building a full breakdown, start to finish.
A Rollout Built Around One Theme
Everything about The Search era has been staged around the idea of searching — for peace, for identity, for a way out of his own head — and “Leave Me Alone” functions as the emotional centerpiece of that framing. The album marks his first full-length release since Perception turned him into a fixture on the charts, and the pressure of following up that success is baked directly into the song’s premise.
Feuerstein has never hidden his discomfort with the industry machinery that comes with hits. “Leave Me Alone” isn’t subtle about wanting space from scrutiny, expectation, and the noise that surrounds a artist whose last record went platinum. It’s less a rap song about fame in the abstract and more a specific account of what his particular version of fame has done to his mental health.
The Search Tour Takes Shape
The video’s release lands next to the confirmed itinerary for The Search Tour, a 29-date North American arena and theater run. Dates begin September 12 in Pittsburgh at Stage AE and wind through stops in Grand Rapids, Columbus, Philadelphia, Charlotte, Nashville — where the September 23 Marathon Music Works show had already sold out — and Louisville before pushing into Canada with shows in Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Vancouver.
The back half of the run swings through the Pacific Northwest and down into the Southwest and California, including a stop at Red Rocks Amphitheatre on October 13, before closing out in late October with dates in Anaheim — both nights at House of Blues already marked sold out — and a final show at San Jose Civic on October 26. For a topic this personal, that’s a lot of stages to carry it across, and it says something about how quickly demand moved that multiple stops sold out before the tour even opened.
OCD Front and Center
What separates “Leave Me Alone” from a standard fame-is-hard anthem is how specifically it names the condition driving the anxiety. NF has referenced OCD in interviews before, but rarely with this much directness in the writing itself. It fits a broader pattern in music and mental health coverage in 2019, where artists increasingly used major releases to put a name on disorders that used to stay vague in lyrics — obsessive thought loops, compulsive behavior, the exhaustion of never getting quiet inside your own head.
For an artist who built a fanbase on confessional writing rather than bravado, that specificity matters. It’s the difference between a song about “pressure” in general and a song about a diagnosed condition that shapes how he processes every single day of the attention “Leave Me Alone” is itself a reaction to.
Feuerstein produced the video with director Patrick Tohill, who also co-produced the piece — the same visual partnership behind the rest of The Search rollout, keeping the album’s cinematic through-line intact from single to single.
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