Led Zeppelin are in the midst of a massive reissue project,
and that means we’re probably going to be getting all sorts of
unearthed rarities and early versions of tracks. “Brandy & Coke” is
just that — an early version of “Trampled Under Foot” that they band shared on their website back in February.
Today they unveiled an interactive video to accompany “Brandy &
Coke” that lets you fiddle around with the different “scenes” in the
various windows. Basically it’s the Physical Grafitti artwork
turned into a choose-your-own-adventure game, where each window gives
you a different video while the song plays in the background. Instead of
just one video, it’s about fifteen. Watch.
Azealia Banks has shared a video for “Ice Princess,” the AraabMusik-produced track from her debut album, Broke With Expensive Taste. There’s no interactive element here like there was with her Google-backed “Wallace” video, but it’s a slick clip directed by the production team We Were Monkeys.
Banks is the titular princess, who owns a pet basilisk that she rides
through the air and wears a Medusa-style snake crown. She leads her CGI
army into battle with a volcano spitting out little multicolored blobs
that eventually end up destroying her.
Danish psych-rock four-piece Mew are set to drop their new album +/- later this spring, and we’ve heard and seen visuals for the lead single “Satellites.” The band shared the follow-up “Waterslides”
a few weeks ago, and today it receives a matching flick from Production
Service Scandinavia. The track builds to a huge crescendo, and the
video does the same through dissonance and abstract interactions. An
ominous feeling gradually gains strength as characters wander through
different scenes acknowledging each others’ existence, but engaging more
with the haunting, sinister presence they cannot see.
Maya Jane Coles has been quietly ruling the international electronic
underground music scene for years now, steadily building a following and
biding her time. Since Nicki Minaj, Drake and Lil Wayne’s
radio-dominating hit “Truffle Butter” sampled Coles’ “What They Say,”
what better time for her to focus on building a stateside reputation?
Donning the moniker Nocturnal Sunshine, she released the debut single
from “Take Me There” a few weeks ago and dropped a video to accompany it today. Directed by The Fashtons,
the visuals depict the British-Japanese producer in a series of
enveloping veils, poses and sheets that reflect the song’s moody twists
and turns.
“Regeneration”
is the first thing we’ve heard from the South East London band
Inheaven, and the song itself contains just about all we know about
them. It’s a toss-up between delicately-spun female vocals, brash,
zealous guitar noise and a half-shout of a chorus that wails against
aging, generations (saw that one coming, right?) and friendships.
There’s plenty of angst but no real animosity. Today we’re premiering
the video for the track, and it’s a post-modern blur of newspaper
headlines, handwritten notes, faded landscapes and head-banging teens —
who may or may not be Inheaven members as they’ve chosen to go the
anonymous route for now. “Regeneration” watches like a home video run
through a time machine that’s set to pull up every scene of rebellion
and aggression from the last half a century.
When fiery emcee Georgia insists, “Ain’t no one gonna tell us that we
ain’t going to move systems,” it’s unclear whether she’s talking about
political upheaval or a worldwide dance-off. The young Brit’s first
single “Move Systems” exudes rebellion from start to finish, showcasing
her confrontational flow over nonstop click-clacking drums and grimy
synth bass. In the track’s video, Georgia is the last woman standing in
an eery, evacuated nightscape, dominating empty pool halls and wig shops
with her serpentine dance moves. If there’s any lingering doubt of just
how in charge she is, her upcoming debut album was written, produced,
and performed by her alone. Who needs the system anyway?
The Smashing Pumpkins have shared a video for the Monuments To An Elegy track “Drum + Fife,” which was directed by the duo of Robin Antiga and
Jimmy Ahlander. “I asked, albeit in an allegorical way, for the video to
represent what our returning soldiers are going through with PTSD, and I
feel that the directors captured that with poignancy” Billy Corgan
explained in a press release. I couldn’t be more proud of the message
we’re sending that we care what happens to those that are out there
hurting.” The video is a chilling look at wartime violence, and the
impact that can have on one’s psyche.
Jay Z is not playing with his big rollout of the streaming service Tidal.
After many big stars tweeted their support last night, those same stars
have shown up in a new 30-second spot for the service’s big relaunch
today. In the ad, we see a collection of luminaries — Jay, Kanye West,
Beyoncé, Jack White, Madonna, Daft Punk, Chris Martin, Nicki Minaj —
gathering to stare intently at… something. Others, like Arcade
Fire and Alicia Keys, seem to be there via Skype. We’ll find out more,
certainly, when Jay makes his big announcement at 5PM eastern today. In
the meantime, shout out to whoever sat Jason Aldean next to the Daft
Punk robots.
Wide-eyed Winnipeg noise-rock veterans KEN Mode rose to a new level of international prominence with 2013’s Entrench — their band name is even the substance of newspaper headline puns now — so should we view their upcoming album title Success genuinely or ironically? Given that they hired Steve Albini to engineer it, perhaps this is their In Utero middle-finger move? Not that Entrench was exactly Nevermind-sleek,
but lead single “Blessed” definitely takes KEN Mode’s sound to new
levels of abrasion, embracing Albini’s scraping, shouting antagonism to
the degree that they sound more like McLusky than Converge at this
point. The song also finds Jesse Matthewson spewing such bile as, “We
can play this game a little bit longer/ But we all know we’re not really
welcome here/ Oh, no.” Watch director Christopher Mills’ striking
performance video.
Benjamin John Power is one half of the great Fuck Buttons, and he
also releases his own intense white-knuckle synth experiments as Blanck
Mass. He’s got a new album called Dumb Flesh coming later in the spring, and first single “Dead Format” is a vein-constricting six-minute blare. Its new video, from director Konx-om-Pax,
fits the song. It’s a non-representational montage of tension-inducing
imagery: Flames, cartoon skulls, cryptic symbols. If you are both high
and in a bad and stressed mood, it’s the sort of thing you can stare at
for hours.
New York noise rockers A Place To Bury Strangers just released their fourth album Transfixation
and today they’ve shared the video for another song “What We Don’t
See.” The video treatment emphasizes the song’s general jarring power by
shifting between images of various physical objects reacting to the
noise of the track. It’s a simple, effective illustration of their
heavy, frantic sound. Watch the Jimmy Fusil-directed video.
When Turnover released the first single off of their forthcoming LP Peripheral Vision a few weeks ago, we named it one of the best songs of the week based on the sheer weight of its emotionalism. “Cutting My Fingers Off”
is a desperate, lonely indulgence in nostalgic, its yearning shot down
by the Virginia-based band’s emotive and entangled guitar work. “New
Scream” encompasses similar wistful themes — its lyrics express the
desire to slow down time, to rewind past memories easily labeled as
“good” and tie a bow around them. The performance video that accompanies
the single was directed by guitarist Eric Soucy’s brother Rob, and his
overcast footage is inter-cut with images of childhood memories and a
ticking alarm clock.
Last week, Killers frontman Brandon Flowers put out his surprisingly good new single “Can’t Deny My Love,”
and now he’s shared a creepy new video to go along with it. The clip
seems to have been inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story Young Goodman Brown.
Flowers stars as the titular character, who leaves his Puritan village
and his wife (played by Evan Rachel Wood) to go off into the woods,
where he runs into a man who tries to offer him a black staff. After he
rejects it, he sees a group of people (including his wife) performing a
satanic ritual in the forest. He wakes up, convinced it must have been a
dream, but not all seems to be right when he returns to his village in
the morning.
Minneapolis band ON AN ON rose from the ashes of Chicago indie-pop
group Scattered Trees in 2012. As the story goes, Scattered Trees booked
studio time for their next record but broke up before they set anything
to tape. Three members — Nate Eiesland, Ryne Estwing, and Alissa Ricci —
stuck around and recorded Give In, the 2013 debut from what became their new project, ON AN ON. Now, the three are back with a follow-up called And The Wave Has Two Sides, and first single “Drifting” promises more of the skittering, mournful pop found on Give In.
The video for “Drifting” takes the song’s melancholic restlessness and
creates a visual world around it, as directors Kyle Gibby and Nick Rush
paint nightmarish dreamscapes to reflect the fear of loss that the song
is rooted in.
Rihanna performed her new single “Bitch Better Have My Money”
live for the first time last night at the iHeartRadio Awards in Los
Angeles. She came on stage out of a stationary helicopter and did the
track wearing a mint-colored fur coat and a pair of thigh-high boots
with support from some futuristically dressed backup dancers.
Madonna also performed her new song “Ghosttown,” with Taylor Swift
joining on backup guitar. Swift won three awards last night: Artist Of
The Year, Song Of The Year for “Shake It Off,” and Best Lyrics for
“Blank Space.” Watch them below.
Future never sleeps. He released his third mixtape in six months, 56 Nights, last week, and has been on a tear releasing videos for songs from both Monster and Beast Mode. For the “Fuck Up Some Commas” video (Free Bandz contributed to Urban Dictionary
if you need the etymology of the phrase) he heads out to a secluded
industrial area to light some stuff on fire, including money! Good thing
they are secluded because that is illegal. Future dances a lot in this
video (and he’s has been dancing a lot more in his videos in general),
so I’m hoping he goes full Rae Sremmurd
and drops a little more choreography next time. He also has those
champagne bottles with sparklers on them that I first saw in the “Lit Like Bic” video, so maybe he has been taking notes on the SremmLife
lifestyle from his fellow Mike Will Made It associates. Clearly, the
best part of this video is when Future goes into his staccato one. word.
at. a. time. rapping. Future hasn’t become the rap savior we were
expecting during his untouchable run a couple years back, but man, no
one can manipulate a beat like him.
QypJaQ is a New York-based rapper who has basically no online
footprint, but it looks like he’s about to “blow away” the Twittersphere
thanks to his high school friend and collaborator, Azealia Banks. The
duo released a video for GypjaQ’s track “Blow Away,” which boasts the
ridiculously clever repeating hook: “Blown away like the cloud/ That
carries the shade.” Produced by Rob Soucy and Nick Ace, who directed
Banks’ interactive “Wallace”
video awhile back, this new one for “Blow Away” is an expertly tailored
portrait that looks like it was a lot of fun to make.
MAX – “Gibberish” (Feat. Hoodie Allen) (Dir. Greg Jardin)
A transitional scene from a Step Up movie suddenly turns
into one of those “Virtual Insanity”-esque single-location
brain-busters. I have no idea how they did any of this, and I actually
wish I knew. The song is trash, of course, but this is not the 5 Best
Songs Of The Week.
On the side, the Fucked Up guitarist and former No Warning frontman
Ben Cook records shivery, synthy power pop under the name Young Guv. He
released his Ripe 4 Luv album a little while ago. The new video for the title track, from director Danielle Nemet,
is made entirely of black-and-white footage of British boxers training
for next year’s Summer Olympics. It has the odd effect of turning “Ripe 4
Luv” into a Rocky-movie training-montage song.
Oscar is a London singer with a difficult-to-Google name, and his
single “Daffodil Days” is a halfway-to-Britpop burst of guitar-spangled
melody. The song might radiate optimism, but its new video sure doesn’t.
Instead, the “Daffodil Days” clip is an almost-apocalyptic narrative about no-hope British kids trying to make do for themselves. Laurie Lynch directed.
Death Grips have shared another video from Jenny Death, the second disc of their double-album The Powers That B. This time it’s the frantic electro-noise-rap rave-up “I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States,” following “On GP” last week. The clip is basically just an insane MC Ride selfie, yet it’s still highly engaging.
Depeche Mode founding member Martin Gore previously announced his solo album MG and shared the single “Europa Hymn.”
It’s a calm, galactic song that has the “sci-fi” and “filmic” qualities
that Gore says represent the sound of the entire album. In that vein,
the video for the clip is a simple, drawing-based clip directed by M-I-E
that incorporates musical equipment like knobs and piano keys into
landscapes that slide by. I love the use of color in the video, shifting
from simple black and white to swaths of rainbow colors. It reminds me
of the rainbow scratch paper I loved as a kid, simple enough for a child but still elegant in the hands of a deft artist.
Jamie xx’s “Loud Places,” the first single from his first-ever solo album In Colour,
teams the xx’s production mastermind with his bandmate Romy Madley
Croft for a soft, murmuring, beautiful house track. And in its brand-new
video, from directors Simon Halsall
and Jean-Baptiste Fugger, the two bandmates skateboard across a
nighttime London cityscape. It’s as sweetly instinctive as the song
itself. Madley Croft, it happens, sings on two tracks from In Colour,
and fellow xx member Oliver Sims shows up on another. One track has
appearances from Atlanta rap livewire Young Thug and Jamaican dancehall
star Popcaan, and that one should be fascinating.
Jillian Hervey and Lucas Goodman make up the silky, pop-funk duo Lion
Babe, who just released their first self-titled EP. Today they’ve
shared a song that wasn’t on that release, the swag-inducing “Wonder
Woman,” that slinks along an ominous little beat that bursts into deep
grooves to match Hervey’s vocal runs. While Goodman stays mostly behind
the scenes, Hervey crawls all over parched desert landscapes and
eye-popping colorful backgrounds in the video. She seems to take the
whole “lion” aspect of their name pretty seriously in these videos.
Liverpool quintet Outfit announced their sophomore album Slowness and shared the lead single “Genderless”
three weeks ago. The follow-up, “New Air,” is a capacious beauty,
slowly unfurling like a blooming rose. The video is just as bare,
leaving cavernous space for the mind to wander and explore. Slowness
was recorded while the members of Outfit were scattered across
different countries and cities, and though distance can doom a project,
that physical space has translated well audibly and visually. Director
Lucy Hardcastle captured the movement and texture of ferrofluid, a
liquid easily manipulated by magnetic fields, to create peculiar visuals
that are just as entrancing as the song. Man is this video fixating.
Torche’s latest album, Restarter, is a chugging beast. It’s “darker, heavier, and moodier”
than a lot of their previous work, as bassist Jonathan Nuñez told us
last month. And as the album’s leadoff track, “Annihilation Affair”
begins the entire experience in a cloud of dust gargantuan enough to
soundtrack a post-apocalyptic hellscape. That’s exactly what unfolds in
the song’s animated video, directed by Phil Mucci. As charred human
remains pile up and crucifixions litter the broken streets, a gaggle of
robotic overlords bash each other’s heads in pursuit of — what else? — a
beautiful woman. As bleak as the subject matter might be, the
cinematography and illustrations are vivid and arresting, like the music
itself
With the first echoing “AY-O,” Hey Elbow’s song “Ruth” is instantly
recognizable. It’s probably not familiar because you’ve already heard
the track, since Hey Elbow hail from Sweden and have made a very small
footprint in the States so far. Instead, the opening moment is nostalgic
because it so easily recalls Harry Belafonte’s “Banana Boat Song,” a
reworking of a traditional Jamaican work song with its distinct
call-and-response “Day-o, Day-o/ Daylight come and me wan’ go home.”
(For better or worse, there’s also this extremely catchy Chris Brown and Tyga song.)
Hey Elbow can easily be cross-referenced with bands like Blonde
Redhead, or Deerhoof, but “Ruth” boasts the kind of maddeningly catchy
introduction that owes itself to historical greats and modern chart
titans. “Ruth” will be released on the band’s forthcoming debut album, Every Other, which is due out in April. Watch an artfully edited video of Hey Elbow performing the song.
Coliseum’s latest J. Robbins-produced album Anxiety’s Kiss is coming this spring on Deathwish Inc. We’ve already heard the record’s first single, “We Are The Water,”
and seen an accompanying video, and now the Louisville-based band puts
forth their latest offering. “Sunlight In A Snowstorm” is presented to
us with a high-contrast black and white video directed by Jaclyn Sheer.
The song is an ode to a much beloved woman in New York City, deeply
sentimental under the trio’s hardened instrumental facade. “Sunlight in
the snowstorm,” goes the lyric. “You’re the only light I see.”
Yumi Zouma shared their new EP II mid-March, and today we’ve got a video for one of the tracks, “Alena.” Like the “Catastrophe”
video before it, the story of “Alena” is a sad, hard one. Director
Allie Avital Tsypin’s vision centers around a recovery group where the
members share their struggles and hardships, even breaking down into
tears at points. But they also share their triumphs, and the video ends
in an unlikely dance party.
California hardcore band Ceremony have announced their fifth album, The L-Shaped Man,
and shared two-part video by director Ross Thomas. “The Separation” +
“The Understanding” isn’t just split in its title; at about the 3:30
mark “The Separation” ends and “The Understanding” begins. As the names
suggest, the album is centered around a breakup; in a press release,
frontman Ross Farrar said the record deals with themes of loss quite directly:
A lot of the content has to do with loss, and
specifically the loss of someone who you care deeply about. There is no
way for you to go through something like this artistically and not have
really strong emotions of loss and pain. There’s not really any way to
hide that.
“Can you measure the loss?” is the insistent question mouthed by a
vacant-eyed woman in “The Separation,” interspersed with clips of the
band playing in blue, clouded seclusion. This pair of songs indicate
that Ceremony’s new album will be a strong follow up to 2012’s Zoo.
It’s a punk-rap summit meeting! On the new track “Squad Deep,” San
Jose brawler Antwon and Ratking street urchin Wiki come together over a
beat from Danny Brown producer and tour DJ Skywlkr. Trash Talk howler
Lee Spielman supplies the hook. In the new video, from director pvndvfvce, Antwon and Wiki flex shirtless on a front porch, using piles of cash as phones or hand towels, and resolutely refuse to lip-sync their song. I’ve never seen anything quite like it before.
The release of Run The Jewels’ RTJ2
will always remind me of 2014’s tumultuous racial climate in the US —
the way Killer Mike and El-P’s lyrics eerily predicted the pattern of
white police officers’ repeated deadly violence against unarmed black
men, Mike’s thoughtful CNN appearances and Billboard op-ed, the powerful speech Mike gave
in St. Louis the night the Darren Wilson ruling came down. And now
director AG Rojas has delivered a video that makes that connection even
plainer. Rojas’ clip for the Zack De La Rocha collab “Close Your Eyes
(And Count To Fuck)” is gripping and simple: a four-minute fistfight
between a black man and a white police officer that ends in surprising\
fashion. Watch the video below, where you can also read a statement from
Rojas.
When Run The Jewels sent me this track, I knew we had the
opportunity to create a film that means something. I felt a sense of
responsibility to do just that. We had to exploit the lyrics and
aggression and emotion of the track, and translate that into a film that
would ignite a valuable and productive conversation about racially
motivated violence in this country. It’s provocative, and we all knew
this, so we were tasked with making something that expressed the
intensity of senseless violence without eclipsing our humanity. For me,
it was important to write a story that didn’t paint a simplistic
portrait of the characters of the Cop and Kid. They’re not stereotypes.
They’re people – complex, real people and, as such, the power had to
shift between them at certain points throughout the story. The film
begins and it feels like they have been fighting for days, they’re
exhausted, not a single punch is thrown, their violence is communicated
through clumsy, raw emotion. They’ve already fought their ways past
their judgements and learned hatred toward one another. Our goal was to
highlight the futility of the violence, not celebrate it.
I am really proud of where we ended up, and I am very thankful that
our actors Shea Whigham and Keith Stanfield committed to these
characters 100%. They breathed complex life into two people who are
usually portrayed in simplistic ways – as archetypes. I can tell you it
was an emotional shoot day. It is tough to re-create moments that are so
fresh and prevalent in our world today. It affected all of us in deep
ways. But I believe that it is important that the way we feel when we
see these events in real life has an effect on us. That we resonate with
what we know to be right and we don’t numb ourselves out so those
feelings can simply be swept away, we must confront them and take some
action, however small, or we’ll be stuck in the same cycle of violence
and hate.
About a month ago Built To Spill announced their first album in six years, Untethered Moon, and shared lead single “Living Zoo.”
Today, they’ve premiered a video for the song directed by Jordan
Minkoff, and it’s a campy, tongue-in-cheek riff on a much-anticipated
big trip. In a very “Bill & Ted”
fashion, the two guys in the clip head out into the great outdoors and
stumble upon a cult-like gathering, a 17th century spirit guide named
Hairy Canary, and finally, end up transformed into a different state of
existence.
Boston DIY-scene kings Pile just scored Album Of The Week honor with their new LP You’re Better Than This,
and they’ve just now unveiled their video for the quick, scratchy
rave-up “Rock And Roll Forever With The Customer In Mind.” In the clip,
bassist Matt Connery plays a high-school burnout whose name is literally
“American Badass” and who gets “fired from school” in the video’s
opening scene. His life then turns into a trippy biker movie. It’s about
as loose and sloppy a music video as you can imagine ever being made,
and the people involved clearly had fun making it. Adric Giles and Ethan
Long directed the video.
Synth-rock stars Passion Pit will release their new album Kindred into the world next month, and they’ve just shared the video for the euphoric first single “Lifted Up (1985).”
The strobe-lit clip shows frontman Michael Angelakos looking
buttoned-up and alone in a few different communal situations: A mosh
pit, an EDM club, and indie rock show. In all three situations, he’s an
island in the crowd, and he seems to be longing for some sort of
transcendence.
King Tuff has shared a video for “Madness,” a track off of last year’s Black Moon Spell.
It starts off at a packed show with a rowdy crowd that looks like it
would give me a lot of anxiety, then transitions into them being on the
road with some non sequiturs including a dude in a gorilla suit
hitchhiking on the side of a highway with a sign that says “ME GO KING
TUFF NOW,” and ends back up at the same show. The clip was directed by
Mike Wartella, who is best known for his cartoon work.
That smirky gentleman staring into your soul up there is Calvin Love,
a veteran of the same Edmonton scene that birthed other oddball indie
rockers like Mac DeMarco and Alex Calder. On 2012’s New Radar, Love borrowed some inspiration and a few neon-colored synths from ’80s new wave, but on his newly announced album Super Future,
he ironically delves even further into the past. First single
“Daydream” is pretty much exactly what its title promises, a gently
loping slice of psychedelia with spiderwebbed guitars and Love’s easy
croon presiding over all. There’s a delay effect on his vocals that
seems somewhat telling — everything in the world of Love’s skewed pop is
just a little bit off, a little bit left-of-center. The new video for
“Daydream,” directed by Laura-Lynn Petrick, matches the song’s warmly
nostalgic sensibility with grainy film-stock footage of Love hanging
around Toronto. When he meets a woman in a café about halfway through,
the video blooms from black and white into soft-focus technicolor, with
shots of wintry cityscapes melting into vibrant greenery and flowers.
Calvin Love seems ready for spring, and I am too.
Hit-Boy is mostly known for being a consistently great producer, but he’s also a capable rapper in his own right. Today, he released a pair of new tracks, both with music videos provided by Psycho Films.
“Automatically” finds Hit-Boy introspectively documenting his rise to
success over a soulful piano sample and production from SmokeyGotBeatz,
while the video shows him hitting up the grocery store and chilling in a
parking garage. “Show Me Something,” produced by Cardo, is more of a
straight banger. It features a guest verse from HS87 buddy B. Carr, and
in the video they’re partying in a bank vault — which seems like a lot
of fun, if a little fiscally irresponsible.
Tink and Timbaland continue their partnership in the video for her latest song “Ratchet Commandments.”
The Chicago rapper dons a series of costumes from choir girl to
Egyptian queen to preach her anti-Instagram “you can’t sit with us”
message that might be catchy but suffers from some serious slut-shaming
vibes. The song takes place in a dystopian warehouse church setting
with plenty of back-up dancers to help Tink spread her gospel. It was
directed by Dave Meyers, who has done visuals for Missy Elliot, OutKast,
Rihanna, and others. Timbaland makes several cameos, of course, and
recently told a crowd at SXSW that Aaliyah appeared to him in a dream
and told him Tink was “The One.” Truly, I don’t need the ghost of
Aaliyah or Timbaland to tell me Tink is incredible, but this song
irritates me with it’s smirking, arbitrary rules. Tink wants a
generation of young queens? Step up and lead them then instead of
spitting shade from afar. Still, the song’s got an unmistakable,
swaggering Timabland funk that’s impossible not to move to, so watch
Tink dance and preach.
One of the most momentous occasions of PC Music’s SXSW showcase
was a rare US appearance from QT, the pop star/soft drink
manufacturer/elaborate conceptual art project starring Quinn Thomas (aka
Hayden Dunham) backed by SOPHIE and A.G. Cook. So far QT has only released one single, “Hey QT,” and her showcase appearance consisted of that song plus lots of talk about her soft drink. (Explains her official website,
“DrinkQT is a 5-calorie, sugar-free, 250ml drink, manufactured to
contribute to upward shine, vertical connectivity and personal growth.”)
Now the song, which is being officially released on XL, has an official
music video that lives up to the mantra “Looks fizzy, tastes bouncy,
feels QT!”
In an interview
last month, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Ruban Nielson announced that the
band will release their third full-length this fall. So far, we’ve only
heard the record’s title-track, “Multi-Love,” which is now accompanied
by a trippy new video directed by Lionel Williams. In addition to
watching the video, you can download an interactive environment based on
the video design. Williams had the following to say about the video’s
unique visual design and aesthetic appeal:
It is meant to represent the vacuum of space by
impressing upon inter-dimensional unfolding, immaterial objects, and
time-driven reverberation of events. The virtual space allows for most
3D objects to trail in time – based on the directions one moves. You can
construct and paint the objects in space to stretch them in any
direction, to create infinitely vast compositional spaces.
Watch the video and download the interactive environment below.
Last week, Atlanta’s Father surprise-released Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?,
a surprise album of meditative DIY rap hedonism. Today, he’s made the
self-consciously twisted “Suicide Party,” which features Slug Christ and
KeithCharles Spacebar, two other members of Father’s Awful Records
crew. The video, which Father co-directed with Mike Ellwood and someone
named Sia (BluntGutsNation) shows the various Awful Records affiliates
hanging themselves, playing Russian roulette, and posing in ski masks
around a campfire. It’s good, clean fun.
Hallelujah The Hills
are one of those relatively obscure acts out of Boston with a hometown
cult following and pockets of hardcore fans scattered throughout the
country. To that end, Re-Vinyl Records are re-pressing their 2014 album Have You Ever Done Something Evil?
on vinyl. In support of the re-release the group are doing a brief tour
and have debuted a new video for “Destroy This Poem.” The visuals are a
play on the way that social platforms have tried to turn videos and
programs into live blogs that consumers can comment on — but the fake
technology goes haywire in the hilarious clip. Zabeth Russell plays the
spokeswoman for the faux-company FanBroadcast.biz, who explains the
product before trolls fill up the screen with their comments. It’s a
pretty spot-on critique of the current state of things, and a creative
way to take on the social sharing culture. The video was directed by the
band’s frontman, Ryan Walsh.
After making videos for the Nikki Nack singles “Water Fountain” and “Real Thing,” Merrill Garbus’ tUnE-yArDs project has just dropped a new clip for the single “Wait For A Minute.” This one stands as a departure from tUnE-yArDs’ usual madcap technicolor Pee Wee’s Playhouse style, relying instead on disorienting, distorted video effects. It’s
busy enough that it’ll hurt your eyes to look at it for long. SNEAL
directs.
No matter his level of recognition, David Byrne is forever a guy
about town. I’ve brushed past him in the East Village, seen him ride a
bike by the Williamsburg Bridge, and the night before flying to Austin
for SXSW, I ended up eating dinner next to him at an unassuming
Caribbean restaurant. It’s fitting, then, that Byrne be present at a
charity tribute in his own honor at Carnegie Hall last night. According
to The Associated Press, color guard enthusiast
Byrne crashed the party with a marching band in tow to play “God’s
Army” and later danced to “Uptown Funk.” View videos of Santigold,
Sharon Jones, O.A.R., and Glen Hansard covering some of Byrne’s greatest
hits and watch the finale and “Uptown Funk” covers below. You can also
check out Amanda Palmer and Alexis Krauss performing alongside Antibalas
at the City Winery rehearsal before the show.
After “But She Was Not Flying” and “Blood,”
I didn’t expect gospel-electro-noise-punk anomaly Algiers to release
something for the club. But the drum-machine rhythm and house melody
that drive “Irony. Utility. Pretext.” are undeniably dance-floor ready.
Admittedly, given the desperation and midnight bleakness coursing
through it, the song would work better as chase music for a 1980s
episode of COPS, but you could definitely dance to it too.
Directors Lamb & Sea’s video begins with the message, “THE MOST
PAINFUL STATE OF BEING IS REMEMBERING THE FUTURE,” which certainly
matches the song’s dystopian feel. Watch the trio sneer and stare in
Bulgaria’s Buzludzha Monument.
Euphoric Baltimore tinkerer Dan Deacon released his new album Gliss Riffer last month, and his video for first single “Feel The Lightning”
was a giddy, bugged-out surreal romp. He’s already outdone it. The
people at Adult Swim produced Deacon’s new video for the album track
“When I Was Done Dying.” In putting the clip together, they invited nine
different animators — Jake Fried, Chad VanGaalen, Dimitri Stankowicz,
Colin White, Taras Hrabowsky, Anthony Schepperd, Masanobu Hiraoka, Caleb
Wood, KOKOFREAKBEAN — to animate different sections of the song. The
result is a psychedelic eye-popping vision that changes way too often for you to ever get bored. It’s quite a thing to behold.
Migos are repping the lead single from their debut album YRN Tha Album hard, and even if “One Time” doesn’t elicit the same crowd response
as “Handsome And Wealthy” or “Hannah Montana,” it’s still an enjoyable
track. In the Ninian Dof-directed clip the Atlanta trio recover from a
wild night interspersed with some incredible stop-motion-sequences that
replay some of the party’s crazier moments. The video includes cameos
from noted Lil B fan Blake Anderson of Workaholics — who we all
know dearly loves parties — and football player DeSean Jackson. And
while I can’t say for sure, I lived in Malibu for four years and I’d be
willing to swear this was shot at a mansion somewhere way off in one the
city’s many canyons.
Last week musical genius Chilly Gonzales released his string-quartet-oriented album Chambers,
which seeks to reimagine the Romantic era for a modern day pop
audience. In that vein, today he shared the video for “Advantage
Points,” one of the album’s most dramatic tracks. Amidst clips of Chilly
and his quartet playing the music, a duel unfolds, revealing in the
process how absurd the practice was. The poor guy moderating the duel
ends up much worse for the wear, and I ended up on a wild goose chase
trying to figure out if there was a name for duel moderators. I couldn’t
find an exact title, so if you know one, let me know in the comments.
Directed by Jonathan Barré,
the clip also includes a rather unlikely love story. In matters of the
heart — and the theatre — necessity is the mother of invention.
Action Bronson released his stupidly fun major-label debut Mr. Wonderful today, and his video for the lilting Mark Ronson-produced Chance The Rapper collab “Baby Blue”
is part of today’s YouTube Music Awards festivities. The concept behind
this one is simple enough: Bronson plays every character that Eddie
Murphy played in the 1988 cinematic classic Coming to America.
Meanwhile, Bronson’s loudmouth buddy Big Body Bes plays Arsenio Hall,
and some bodybuilder lady plays Shari Headley. Chance The Rapper doesn’t
play James Earl Jones, which seems like maybe a tiny bit of a missed
opportunity. He pretty much just plays Chance The Rapper. He’s good at
that, though. Lil Chris directs. The video marks a high achievement in dirtbag chic.
Charli XCX's video for "Famous" from her recent album Sucker was created as part of the YouTube Music Awards. Which is kind of crazy, since the video is a surreal takedown of internet culture.
Directed
by Eric Wareheim ("Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!"), the clip
features a Charli fan attempting to dance to the song's video in spite
of her rapidly disappearing cell phone and tablet charge. It gets...
increasingly dark as that continues to be a problem. (Charli shows up as
herself, and as a scab-covered version of herself.
Shamir's debut album Ratchet
is out May 19 on XL. Today, he's shared the video for "Call It Off",
directed by Philip Hodges. Shamir gets transformed into a puppet as he
and his crew dispense advice in a clothing store. According to a press
release, the song "is about the transformative joy we feel when we
finally get ourselves out of bummer situations – relationships, bad
career moves, whatever it is."
Last summer, the Brooklyn-based duo Courtship Ritual released Pith, a minimalist collection of dark songs that we named Album Of The Week. Their latest offering is a video for Pith‘s stand-out, echoing song “Ancient Drip” which will be released on a Godmode Records compilation American Music at the end of the month. Directed by Anthony Sylvester, the video
features the members of Courtship Ritual wandering through a
kaleidoscopic forest.
First things first: FKA twigs is going to release a new EP this year.
That’s great news! “Glass & Patron” is the first thing we’ve heard
from it, and twigs’ new video for it just appeared online as one of the
videos that this year’s YouTube Music Awards have thrown up online. (A rescored version of “Glass & Patron” already appeared in twigs’ Google Glass “concept film.”)
The video, which twigs directed herself, is easily one of the best of
the year, a staggering vision that nobody else could’ve pulled off. (She
also directed the “Pendulum”
video, and we’re going to have to call her, among other things, one of
the best video directors working right now.) It starts off as a surreal
Cronenbergian take on pregnancy, and it turns into David Lynch making an
Aaliyah video at a vogue ball. It also serves as the best evidence
we’ve yet seen that twigs is an absolutely incredible dancer. Seriously,
you need to get a look at this thing.
Florence and the Machine have shared the video for "St. Jude", another song from the forthcoming How Big How Blue How Beautiful. Directed by Vincent Haycock, it continues a narrative that began in the video for "What Kind of Man".
"It’s
obviously about relationships, but it’s also about Florence traveling
through our version of the Divine Comedy," Haycock said in a press
release. He also said the video depicts "the first layer of Hell."
This week, joyous cut-and-paste indie-poppers the Go! Team return with their new album The Scene Between,
and they’re also coming out with five brand-new videos, one per day.
They’re starting things off with a clip for the dizzy head-rush single “What D’You Say?”
The clip is all adorable seaside hijinks, and director Michael Robinson
created its sun-dappled look by using double-exposed Super 8 film.
Mini Mansions, the trio led by Queens Of The Stone Age bassist
Michael Shulman, scored one major coup when they got Brian Wilson to
guest on their single “Any Emotions,” and then they scored another when Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner showed up on their “Vertigo.”
He’s also in their new “Vertigo” video, looking dapper and dangerous
amidst a whole lot of spookiness. The clip stars an invisible man, a
dark wizard, a ski-masked assassin, and a whole lot of topless women. So
many topless women. If Twisted Sister had been allowed to show boobs in
their videos and if they had noir pretensions, they would’ve probably
made a video like this in 1986. Watch it below.
The nicest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say about Jack White is that
he’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page if they were the same person. That gets
at White’s appeal, but when you sit White next to the genuine article,
you see that he still has a ways to go. Over the weekend, White
headlined the Lollapalooza Argentina festival. Robert Plant, who also
played the show, joined him onstage to sing Led Zeppelin’s thunderous
1969 rager “The Lemon Song.”
And even at the age of 66, Plant hits notes that White couldn’t even
dream about. It’s fun to see the two share a stage, and maybe it’ll be a
taste of things to come. Last year, Plant said
that he loves White’s “buccaneer spirit” and that he might like to
record with him. Maybe we can make that happen now? Check out the
performance.
Modest Mouse’s new video for their Strangers To Ourselves single “Lampshades On Fire”
is a dizzy barrage of fucked-up and surreal imagery, presented almost
entirely without context. A needle pierces a cheek. A mousetrap snaps on
some guy’s tongue. A naked man jumps on a bed while Orange Is The New Black
star Natasha Lyonne stares off into the middle distance. Various people
with faces painted white wander the earth, looking supremely out-of-it.
It’s hard to say what any of it means, but it’s all vivid and
memorable. Jorge Torres-Torres directs.
Chastity Belt’s new LP, Time To Go Home, is out today, and
they make a good case for the album in the form of director Joe
Holcomb’s video for anti-slut-shaming anthem “Cool Slut.” The music is a
fine example of Chastity Belt’s “What if the Bangles sounded more like
Real Estate?” M.O., and the lyrics remind us why these women chose
Chastity Belt as their ironic band name. The chorus goes, “To all the
girls in the world/ Trying to take off their shirts/ Ladies, it’s OK to
be/ It’s OK to be slutty.” Line after memorable line follows: “We’re
just a couple of sluts/ So what? We like to fuck.” Meanwhile, the
visuals play like a lo-fi version of an old sitcom intro culled from
some dusty VHS. It’s immensely entertaining.
Last night, at an intimate secret show in West London, Blur performed their upcoming album The Magic Whipin its entirety. During the encore, as a treat for the assembled fans, the Britpop legends also played Parklife deep cut “Trouble In The Message Centre” for the first time in about 20
years. As frontman Damon Albarn needlessly cautioned, “We haven’t
played this for twenty years so we might be a bit rusty.”
A month ago, Blur announced the imminent release of The Magic Whip, their eighth album and their first in 12 years. They also shared the first single “Go Out,”
which harkened back to the giddy, ragged, melodic Blur of the Britpop
era. Tonight, the band will play the whole new album at a secret show
somewhere in West London. And today, they shared a second song, an
overpopulation-blues lament called “There Are Too Many Of Us.”
Musically, it’s closer to the Blur of 2003’s Think Tank, with
synths and strings and vocoders that show some serious Berlin-era Bowie
influence. The song comes paired with video of Blur playing it in what
looks like a practice space.
"India is special and its beauty absolutely humbled me. When we toured
there as Major Lazer, it was mind blowing to see our fan-base and we
wanted to incorporate the attitude and positive vibes into our video and
just do something that embodies the essence of Major Lazer. Major Lazer
has always been a culture mashup and to us, India feels like some kind
of special creature with one foot in history and one firmly in the
future. The experience is something we’ll never forget.“
Brooklyn rapper Ka has a flickering, incantory take on New York
boom-bap that comes entirely from the man himself; he barely ever works
with anyone else, in any capacity. But Ka recently formed a new Manchurian Candidate-inspired
duo with the producer Preservation, whose style is, if anything, even
more minimal than his own. Together, they’ve got an album called Days With Dr. Ken Lo coming sometime soon, and we’ve already posted their new “Day 0”
video. Their new self-directed “Day 3″ clip is along those same lines:
Murky, noirish shots of New York at its darkest, all artfully framed,
with Ka playing a wise and wizened street samurai throughout.
Snoop Dogg takes off to a retro-futuristic paradise packed with life's finest, freshest things in the new video for "Peaches N Cream," the Pharrell-produced, Charlie Wilson-assisted first single from his upcoming LP, Bush.
Both Wilson and Pharrell — donning yet another towering hat — join Snoop in this magical land built out of CGI graphics that would've looked mind-boggling at the turn of the century. But when mixed with ancient Egyptian symbols and a Seventies funk aesthetic, these old school graphics unsurprisingly work in Snoop's favor.
The MC luxuriates in a fly fur coat as the power of green screen allows him to be transported to a moonlit hedge garden and caressed by a handful of bodiless arms, which, at the end, seem to ostensibly belong to the smoke monster from Lost.
The video for "Peaches N Cream" comes a little over a week after Snoop dropped the delectable, neo-disco cut. Pharrell produced the entire album, which is scheduled for release on May 12th via Snoop's own Doggy Style Records, Pharrell's i am OTHER label and Columbia Records.
Bush finds Snoop Dogg reclaiming his hip-hop nom de plume after exploring the worlds of reggae and funk under the names Snoop Lion and Snoopzilla. The MC has been teasing Bush for several months now, revealing in January that the LP would feature a guest appearance by Stevie Wonder.
Snoop Dogg is also scheduled to helm this year's keynote conversation at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. He'll take the lectern on Friday, March 20th at 11 a.m. CT in Ballroom A of the Austin Convention Center. The event will be open to all Music and Platinum registrants and registered showcasing artists.
Our last-ever Mixtape Of The Week column, before we switched over to the Week In Rap, was dedicated to Lil Wayne’s Sorry 4 The Wait 2.
Given that Wayne had a huge hand in making the mixtape landscape what
it is, that’s appropriate. The tape opened with Wayne’s version of O.T.
Genasis’ pounding street hit “CoCo,”
using it to explicitly address his legal battle with Cash Money
Records. Wayne has now made a video for the “CoCo” freestyle, and it’s
got him, shirtless in a ski mask, trying to break out of a metal cage.
As metaphors go, that one seems pretty obvious. We also get archival
footage of Wayne and Birdman when things were still cool, and a few gory
movie clips for good measure. Eif Rivera directs.
For a new Record Store Day single, the former Smiths axe wizard
Johnny Marr has recorded a version of Depeche Mode’s 1993 single “I Feel You.”
The Marr version switches out Depeche Mode’s synth-throb for guitar
crunch and turns it into a pretty straightforwardly bluesy Brit-rock
song. The new video, from director David Barnes,
is on the straightforward side, too. It’s a simple performance clip
with Marr and his younger bandmates posing and brooding against a black
background.
It seems like every night lately, a different beloved rapper is ready
to announce a new surprise album right around midnight. Last night, it
was Earl Sweatshirt, who has at least given us a week to mentally
prepare for his Doris follow-up I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside. When making that announcement, he also shared a new song, a mournful and murky rap dirge called “Grief.”
He’s already shared that song’s video, and it’s just as dark as the
music. In the clip, we see Earl, his face glowing in some kind of weird
night-vision/black-light way, wandering through a black-and-white
nightmare dreamscape. He encounters mice and snakes and fire and masked
drummers. It’s a bleak, eerie vision.
Björk has shared the video for "Family" from her latest album, Vulnicura. A collaboration between Björk and Andrew Thomas Huang (who also directed the "Black Lake" video currently on view at Björk's MoMA retrospective), the clip shows Björk sewing herself back together and bringing to life the awesome artwork from the physical release, which is in fact a still from the video.
Last month, the trap-EDM producer Carnage and the rising Atlanta
chillwave-rap cause celebre iLoveMakonnen teamed up for the ridiculously
catchy single “I Like Tuh.” Now, director Colin Tilley
has used that song as his application to join the ranks of music-video
directors who go on to make movies. Tilley’s “I Like Tuh” video spans 10
minutes, and it tells the story of a mysterious bag of blue pills that
sends a small town’s grimy underworld into chaos. Makonnen and Carnage
show up toward the end, and nothing good happens to them. The is
basically Smokin’ Aces: The Music Video, and it’s a nasty, fun piece of work.
I’ve never been to New Orleans, but I’ve only heard good things, and
Generationals’ new video for “Charlemagne” — a track off the duo’s most
recent album, Alix — only makes me want to visit more. The band
highlights the abundant culture of their hometown by showing off some
quick shots of the local characters you might find there, which is all
tied together with a dance choreographed by Brazilian dancer Diego De
Lima. The video is shot in a breezy, slo-mo style that matches the
track’s laid back attitude. “New Orleans itself is so colourful, vibrant
and full of character, we wanted reflect that in the video- it’s like
no where else in the world,” video director Erin Barry said in a press
release.
The Atlanta-via-Mississippi duo Rae Sremmurd released SremmLife, the most dizzily catchy pop-rap album in recent memory, at the top of the year. And “Throw Sum Mo,” the album’s Nicki Minaj/Young Thug collab, is quickly succeeding “No Flex Zone” and “No Type”
as the duo’s next massive hit. Given that the song is a strip-club
anthem, it makes sense that the brand-new video takes place entirely in
one such establishment. It’s a bit surprising, though, that every
stripper in the video wears rollerskates. Is that a real thing, or are
they just riffing on Boogie Nights 18 years later? Migos,
Birdman, and Mike Will Made-It all show up in the video, and Thug gets a
really great entrance in a stoner van.
Surprise! Death Grips are still a band, sort of. They’ve been teasing their final album Jenny Death for a while now, and yesterday they dropped the first single “On GP”
accompanied by a video. However, this original video, which featured
Death Grips hanging out inside the echo chamber of Studio 1 at Sunset
Sound Recorders in Hollywood, was not the “official music video.” Death
Grips dropped that self-directed gem via their Facebook page a few minutes ago.
The DIY polyglot pop producer Pictureplane released his “Hyper Real”
single last month, and its new video is a good one. The clip documents
one hell of a house party — the type that involves mysterious energy
drinks, random hookups, enormous goths, face-tatted miscreants, neon
vomit, and an absolutely great surprise ending. Jesus Rivera directed it
and did a pretty amazing job of it.
The most important Radiohead video is probably this clip, of the band playing “Creep” at the MTV Beach House in 1993. That’s the video that showed what the band could’ve easily been: A one-hit wonder playing for disinterested frat boys and beach bunnies, looking uncomfortable and humiliated while knocking out their one perfect diamond of a pop song in the worst possible location. Instead, Radiohead became a generation-defining band by challenging expectations at every turn, building an elliptical and challenging body of work along the way. Their videos were a big part of that. Radiohead were making music videos for the internet for years before YouTube was a thing, and while they aren’t all good — there are plenty of half-baked CGI experiments in their video oeuvre — they’re all interesting. We picked the 10 best, and we count them down below. (Note: “Rabbit In Your Headlights” isn’t a Radiohead video, so it isn’t on this list. It would be top three, easy, though.)
10. “Nude” (2008, Dir. Adam Buxton & Garth Jennings)
A thought experiment in all the ways you can make a group of people look creepy and alien through simple use of slow motion. The screwed-and-chopped version of Thom Yorke’s jitter-dance is a hypnotic thing.
9. “Pop Is Dead” (1993, Dir. Dwight Clarke)
“Creep” might be the iconic moment that introduced this band to an international audience, but its video is a straight Nirvana bite, as are the band’s other circa-Pablo Honey videos (except “Stop Whispering,” which looks like a Verve Pipe video). “Pop Is Dead” is the only one that holds up, mostly because of how much Yorke visibly enjoys playing a dandified vampire in a glass coffin. Bonus points for being the first Radiohead video that didn’t try to hide Phil Selways’ baldness.
8. “Go To Sleep” (2003, Dir. Alex Rutterford)
The disquieting all-CGI version of the “Just” video, with catastrophic destruction standing in for an unheard cosmic joke. A polygonal Yorke looks on as the workaday world crumbles and then builds itself back up.
7. “Paranoid Android” (1997, Dir. Magnus Carlsson)
The endless, nonsensical NSFW animated odyssey that more or less invented the deeply randomized Adult Swim aesthetic.
6. “No Surprises” (1997, Dir. Grant Gee)
Visually static and not entirely unboring, but the image of Yorke gasping for breath after letting water submerge his whole head in his space helmet is an iconic one. Also: Possibly the first lyric video ever made?
5. “There, There” (2003, Dir. Chris Hopewell)
Even before its nightmare ending, this is probably Radiohead’s most dreamlike video, with Yorke moving like a jittery wraith through a stop-motion wonderland that turns out to be more dangerous than he might’ve imagined.
4. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” (1996, Dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Radiohead didn’t do too much work with iconic music-video directors, and when they did team up with Michel Gondry for “Knives Out,” it was an ass-ugly disaster. So their two clips with Glazer, who would go on to direct Sexy Beast and Under The Skin, are rare team-ups with a director who has the same sense of vision that they do. Nothing much happens in the “Street Spirit” video, but its uncanny slo-mo and sumptuous black-and-white make it a weirdly ravishing vision. It’s a crime that I can’t find a hi-res version online.
3. “Karma Police” (1997, Dir. Jonathan Glazer)
The band’s second Glazer collab is a ponderous but intense vision with its own dream-reality logic. Watching it on YouTube feels like a distant echo of the way so many of us experienced it for the first time, catching it while flipping through channels drunk or stoned, late at night. Fun fact: Glazer originally pitched the video to Marilyn Manson, and Manson shot him down.
2. “Lotus Flower” (2011, Dir. Garth Jennings)
Thom Yorke pushes his frantic onstage head-bobbles way, way past their logical conclusion and finds a new kind of internet immortality in the future. It was nearly as great when Yorke went full-on modern dance with it in Atoms For Peace’s “Ingenue” video, but the level of swagger it must’ve taken to pull this off on its own is a hell of a thing to consider.
1. “Just” (1995, Dir. Jamie Thraves)
The mysterious, elliptical story is beautifully told; it’s a rare case where a music video uses subtitles and it doesn’t feel like a lazy shortcut. The expressionistic cinematography is otherworldly and powerful. And the band themselves throw themselves into the act of pretending to play music with a level of commitment and confidence that they haven’t shown before or since.
Stockholm-based producer Ishi released “Push It,”
his appropriately titled collaboration with Pusha T a few weeks ago,
and now follows that up with a video for the song. The cosmic clip is an
assault of burning roses, menacing wolves, ballerinas, and Pusha
reigning supreme over the entire cosmic kingdom, bringing One Thousand And One Arabian Nights
to life by rapping about a snake charmer. Actually, the more I watch
this video, the more likely it seems that some of these images came
straight from the mind of Scheherazade. The clip was directed by Alex
Wessely, who’s previously worked with Rihanna, Drake, and Big Sean.
Accordingly, this video is as cinematic as any pop star’s would be.
Don’t turn it off when the credits start to roll at 3:30, though, or
you’ll miss the 20-second snowy showdown that kicks as an epilogue.
Vision Fortune — the noisy, experimental duo from London — have
shared a video for “Back Crawl II,” a teeth-chattering track off of
their sophomore album, Country Music. It’s a creepy affair,
alternating between shaky, shadowy footage of some trees and X-ray shots
of a tongue lolling about in an open mouth that feels like it could
swallow you whole. Not much goes on, but it sets the mood for the track
really well.
Grimes first linked up with Fun. co-leader Jack Antonoff on “Take It Away,” a 2014 song from Antonoff’s solo side project Bleachers. And now they’ve teamed up once again,
this time for an absolutely dazzling pop song called “Entropy.” It’s a
power-pop tune, more or less, with the same sort of sparkling production
that Antonoff brought to Taylor Swift’s “Out Of The Woods.”
But it’s very much a Grimes song, too, with that otherworldly echoing
reverb all over Claire Boucher’s voice. The song will appear on
tonight’s episode of HBO’s Girls. They’ve shared it a bit
early, which is nice, since it’s also a pretty perfect Sunday-morning
soundtrack.
Last year, the Queens rap bully and frequent Action Bronson
collaborator Meyhem Lauren teamed up with the veteran boom-bap producer
Buckwild for the excellently titled Silk Pyramids album. Lauren directed his own sunny, atmospheric video for “100 MPH,” a
warm shit-talk session that features Bronson. In the video, we see
Lauren and Bronson doing pushups and grilling lobsters, looking
absolutely happy to be hanging out together. It’s the kind of rap video
where it seems like a cameraman really just tagged along on a really fun
afternoon.
Devonté Hynes and Neneh Cherry were commissioned by Selfridges — a
high-end UK department store — to write a new song called “He, She, Me”
to soundtrack an original film that was directed by Alex Turvey and
Kathryn Ferguson. “The film is an evolving journey through a subtle push
and pull between masculinity and femininity, captured entirely in one
unbroken shot, utilising in-camera camera effects in a world populated
by out-scaled physical props inspired by Faye Toogood’s in store
realisation of Agender,” the directors explained in a press release.
“This film has come at a time when important conversations about gender
fluidity and non-binary ways of being are finally getting a lot of
attention.”
Directed and edited by Tom Kirk and Simon Bennett
Produced by Banoffee Sky
Post Production: Clare Julia
Artwork illustration and animation by Matt Mahurin
Director of Photography: Matt Hayslett
SEKDEK creator: Brice Frillici
SEKDEK Producer: Lee Sayer
Ever-prolific noise-gauze purveyors Deerhoof released their 12th full-length album, La Isla Bonita (Stream),
late last year and have continued to release accompanying visuals for
various tracks from that record. In January we got Satomi Matsuzak
strolling around the British shoreline in the “Black Pitch”
video, but the animated visuals for “Tiny Bubbles” that came out today
reach a much deeper emotional level for the band. At least for drummer
Greg Saunier, who spoke at length with Mashable about the video, and how
the animator connected to his vision of the song in an uncanny way:
It was a friend of Joyful Noise that got in touch with
them and said he wanted to make a video, and the role that I played in
this video was not to say no. I did not prevent this friend of Joyful
Noise from making the video — I didn’t have any idea what it would be. I
didn’t know the person — I still don’t. Never met them. So when this
animated video arrived suddenly one day in my inbox and I watched this
thing, I feel that the animator has not only understood the song and the
words, but to a level that felt uncanny — you know sometimes you have
that feeling where it’s like you meet someone and you’ve known them your
whole life. And this kinda felt like that — like he seemed to nail the
ethos of what we wanted to do with that song and with the whole record
to such a T that it was like — sometimes it’s like an out-of-body
experience.
If that’s not a good reason to watch a video, I don’t know what is. Although Saunier wasn’t sure of the creator, Geoff Hoskinson directed and animated the poignant, capitalism-condemning clip.
As TCTS, Manchester producer Sam O’Neill makes the kind of itchy,
irresistible house that American audiences most readily identify with
Disclosure. Like the Lawrence brothers, he’s also eager to pair his
skill as a producer with soulful, emerging singers such as Sam Sure or his recent Jessie Ware
remix. The same goes for his new single “Thinking About You,” which
features Leo Kalyan with some seriously lush vocals. Today we’re
premiering the WVLFCVB-directed
video for the track. It follows an unsuspecting, apathetic factory
worker through the discovery of a hidden labyrinth of experiments and
underworlds all happening right under his nose. From a green-lipsticked
jungle dominatrix to medical experiments with cloning and even spooky
mannequins, the visuals ape the way music can open up whole new worlds
for us in already-familiar territory.
Björk is one of the great music-video artists of all time, and she’s
just shared her clip for the devastating “Lionsong,” from her
bottomlessly sad new album Vulnicura. Her longtime collaborators Inez & Vinoodh directed the video, and it features Björk wearing the human-dandelion outfit from the Vulnicura
cover art, her heart visibly beating out of her chest. Here’s how the
directors describe the video: “Björk’s character for ‘Lionsong’ had to
be smooth like a spider waiting in her web and seductive like a Balinese
dancer cast in bronze. She is seen as if under a microscope, baring her
heart while luring us inside the bloody galaxy of her own wound.” While
you have to go to Björk’s MoMA exhibit to see her 3D video for album centerpiece “Black Lake,” this one is up online for all of us.
A mashup of 'Dinosaurs' (TV Series 1991–1994) and Hypnotize by The Notorious B.I.G (1997).
Remixed and released by @benjaminrrrrr under the doctrine of fair use.
For months, we’ve been hearing about HBO’s forthcoming Kurt Cobain documentary Montage Of Heck,
which his daughter Frances Bean Cobain executive produced. It’ll be the
first-ever authorized Cobain doc, and it’ll include unreleased tracks
like a Beatles cover and a 12-minute acoustic song.
And today, we get to see our first glimpse of the finished product. The
new trailer for the documentary just appeared online, and it includes
talking-head interviews with Courtney Love and Krist Novoselic, footage
of Cobain of a child, and — I’m not too sure about this part — a whole
lot of animation. I got chills twice; your mileage may vary.
When “My Jam”
first dropped, not only did I laud it as the next inescapable song of
the summer, I also fervently wished it would get a dance-ready, colorful
video. My wish has been granted. Bobby Brackins, Zendaya, and Jeremih
all cleared their schedules, hopped a flight to Puerto Rico, and
captured the day-drunk, effervescent feel of the song. The clip is a
cinematic tour through the island’s countryside combined with the
colorful pop-rock magic of their traveling dance party. Most of all,
it’s fun. “My Jam” follows in the long lineage of songs like
“Happy” that can be enjoyed with the same enthusiasm by anyone from nine
to 90. Considering the song’s G-rating and Zendaya’s recent graduation
from the Disney channel crowd, I bet a lot of kids are going to be
dancing along to the video this summer.
The concept of time gracefully underscores Kathryn Calder’s solo
work. The New Pornographer and former Immaculate Machine frontwoman is
working on her kickstarter-funded documentary, A Matter of Time,
about the process of recording her first solo album while caring for
her dying mother. The new video for “Take A Little Time,” from her
eponymous third album is a more lighthearted meditation on temporality —
how it can inspire, terrify, and ultimately heal you. She outruns a
horde of floating, illustrated monsters before finally reaching the
moment of divine inspiration. Watch the video and check out her tour
dates below.
In making her new video for “Wallace,” a track from her 2014 album Broke With Expensive Taste,
Azealia Banks did something different. The video is an interactive
piece of work, one that you help control via webcam. Apparently, the way
you move your face controls the way her face moves, and your face also
shows up behind her from time to time. (That’s me up there. Hi.) Nick Ace and Rob Soucy
directed the video, and it distorts Banks’ face in some compelling and
alien ways. You need the Google Chrome browser for the video to work,
but if you have that, you can watch it here.
Steve Gunn has been quietly climbing out of his role as a backing
guitarist for Kurt Vile and into a marquee role of his own. Today, that
role has been firmly cemented with the announcement that he’s leaving
Paradise Of Bachelors, the independent label with a keen eye for all
things folk, and signing with indie giant Matador Records. For now, he’s
still touring in support of his excellent 2014 release Way Out Weather,
and today shared the video for that album’s “Wildwood.” In the clip,
directed by Dan Murphy, Gunn wanders through the toll bridges,
convenience stores, and wilderness of Wildwood, New Jersey.
Yannick Iluga, the Capetown producer known as Petite Noir, just released his debut EP The King Of Anxiety,
a collection of his slim, joyous, South African bedroom pop. Dubbed
“noirwave,” his songs manage to contain a roiling darkness that’s always
buoyed up by light touches and a frenetic sense of groove. In the newly
released video for “The Fall” you can see these elements in his visual
aesthetic too, as the stark black and white setting constantly shifts
between shadow and light. Ilunga co-directed the video with Rochelle
Nembhard and cited Marina Abramovic as an inspiration:
The video is inspired by the work of Serbian artist
Marina Abramovic, and in particular her ‘The Artist is Present’
performance art piece (MoMa 2010), where she was reunited with her
ex-lover, the German artist Ulay, after 22 years apart. It’s intended as
a raw and transparent look into what we do to each other in
relationships, setting aside the fakeness and pretense that we shroud
ourselves in.
Iluga is currently working on his first full-length album, which
should be out later this year. For now, watch his new video.
