Aly and AJ Michalka landed in Berlin last September with a single film camera, one crew member (Aly’s husband, Stephen Ringer), a handful of outfits, and only a vague idea of the city’s geography. They had just 72 hours to shoot the music video for their new single, “Attack of Panic,” out February 7.

As they crisscrossed the city in boots and pleather pants, choosing different locations—an underground subway station, a cobblestone square, a backlit bar—to perform loose modern-style choreography, they attracted little knots of curious Berliners (“People were like, ‘Who are these American weirdos?’” AJ joked) and raced to get the shots they needed before the sun went down, or their camera lens fogged up in the sudden warmth of a club, or they were kicked out altogether.

Meanwhile, AJ was reading scripts for the show she stars in, ABC’s Schooled, from 5,780 miles away, on the phone to producers in Los Angeles at 2 a.m. Berlin time. “We literally sat at Paris bar and [she was] breaking down,” Aly recalled. To put it mildly, AJ added, “Nothing about our experience there was relaxed.”

Luckily, it all fit the theme. “Attack of Panic” was inspired by a conversation Aly had with the father of a friend whose first language is Italian, and who was describing the paroxysms of fear and anxiety that had begun to seize him later in life. The Italian-to-English translation flipped the traditional phrase, “panic attack,” in a way Aly, 30, found compelling. “It’s literally an attack of panic. It attacks your senses. It attacks your entire being.”

“The idea of panic setting in is really, really visceral for Aly and I,” added AJ, 28, who at one point in her life experienced periodic panic attacks that left her “absolutely wiped out.” “Chaos is so relevant right now,” she said, “especially as young women in our 20s and 30s figuring out where we want to go in life, who we want to be, how we’re looked at.”

When it comes to the lens of public perception, Aly and AJ are experts. The two grew up as tween stars, Aly on Disney Channel’s Phil of the Future and Now You See It… and AJ joining her in Cow Belles, which saw them gain notoriety as a sister duo. They established their musical act in 2004, and released their debut record, Into the Rush, the following year under the Disney-owned Hollywood Records. (From personal experience, “Rush” and “Chemicals React,” both off that album, stir up some heavy millennial nostalgia.) Two more albums followed, the third featuring “Potential Breakup Song,” in 2007, which really took them into the stratosphere. Then came a split with their record label, the tabling of various projects, and a relative departure from music altogether.