Don Giovanni signees Worriers released their Laura Jane Grace-produced LP, Imaginary Life,
earlier this month. The album weaves the personal and the political
together into a collection of punk songs that encourage self-reflection
but are still hook-heavy and danceable. Before its release, Worriers
debuted the video
for “Most Space,” in which the band takes an anxiety-ridden ride on the
subway. The accompanying visuals to “Chasing” are claustrophobic in a
different way. Worriers’ lead singer Lauren Denitzio tries and fails and
tries again to find someone to go home with at a house show. Emilyn
Brodsky co-stars in the David Combs- and Benjamin Epstein-directed
video.
The cheeky title sounds like something better fit for Tumblr (or a Prince record) than a metal album. But check out APL’s NSFW website (it’s a Tumblr) and Master’s always entertaining and often insightful selfie- and emoji-filled Twitter,
and you’ll see it’s the self-aware vernacular he’s paired with dark,
sexualized imagery and his evolving concept of “purple metal,” a genre
tag he coined for APL. The black-and-white Americana-filled video for
“No Longer N 2 U,” directed by Steven Paseshnik and Master, feels like
an extension of that online APL vibe, spelled out in more than 140
characters for those who haven’t picked up on what Master’s been laying
down. Watch.
The lo-fi singer-songwriter Alex G is only 22, but he’s already getting ready to release his seventh album Beach Music. He’s not in the video for first single “Bug.” Instead, Micah Van Hove
directs a story about a photogenically scuzzy young couple who spend a
stoned, romantic afternoon in the sunshine. There’s nothing
revolutionary about the clip, but it’s a fine example of the “damn, I
wish I was there” school of music video.
Zola Jesus is still pumping out videos for songs off her latest album, Taiga (Stream), which came out last October. The last one we got was back in January when “Hunger”
was released as a single, and now “Nail” is being given the same
treatment. It shares the same shadowy subtlety as the rest of Zola
Jesus’ visuals from this era, and was directed by long-time collaborator
Jacqueline Castel. Here’s how Castel describes the video in a press
release:
The video for ‘Nail’ conceptually explores the dualistic
themes of vulnerability and strength, bondage and freedom, death and
rebirth in parallel to the lyrical content of the song. “Performing
within a custom made sensory deprivation bed built by S&M pioneers
Kink Engineering, Nika was sealed between sheets of opaque black latex
with a high powered shop vac for each take – a physically aggressive and
demanding form of restraint that requires breathing through rubber
tubing constructed within the bed. Stripped of the superfluities of the
flesh, her performance reveals the surreality of the dehumanized form.
A day ahead of Poison Season’s release, Destroyer has shared a new video for his latest single “Times Square.”
Apparently, there were plans to shoot the whole video in the titular
New York City landmark, but it didn’t pan out: “We ended up just
wandering around New York til 3am and the city seemed completely dead.
We could have been anywhere, really,” director Shayne Ehman explained in
a press release. So, instead, they made what you’ll see below: an
absurdist stop-motion animated video with more shots of nature than
you’d expect for a song about the tourist capital of the world. Here’s
some more words from Ehman:
I needed to get outside and shoot in natural light in
order to serve as a sort of conduit for those ‘forces of nature in
love…’ which seem to rule the song. I let the sun do its thing and let
the earth do it’s thing and watched time unfold. I watched the clouds
unfold and unpack and packup. I was at their mercy, completely.
It’s been seven damn years since Eagles Of Death Metal, Josh Homme’s
Queens Of The Stone Age side-project duo with old co-conspirator Jesse
Hughes, last released an album. But this fall, they return with the new
LP Zipper Down, and now they’ve got a video for “Complexity,”
its fast, rip-snorting riff-rock lead single. If you close your eyes
and listen to “Complexity,” you might imagine Camaros doing donuts, but
that’s not what Hughes and Homme give you. Instead, it’s a
black-and-white piece so arty and dramatically lit that it immediately
calls to mind the old SNL sketch “Sprockets.” It’s just Hughes
and Homme, arranged in various intense poses, staring at the camera and
singing the song, and it’s so minimal that it feels like a plot twist
when things turn to color. But it works anyway, because of the contrast
between the song and the visuals and because Hughes and Homme have great
faces. Meanwhile, Homme also debuted another new EODM song called “Got A
Woman” on his Beats 1 Radio show, as Pitchfork reports. To hear it, head over here and skip to the 46:30 mark.
On their recent debut Blood Dancer, genre-bending Chicago
outfit Crown Larks threw psych-rock, noise music, and free jazz into one
album-shaped pot and stirred until the whole thing combusted. “Chapels”
is one of the more straightforward tracks — and even that spins out
into a demented keyboard boogie towards the end — but now they’ve shared
a new video that significantly ups the weirdness factor. The band plays
in grotesque masks and costumes while two wraithlike women wander
around various landscapes, contorting their bodies inhumanly. I have no
idea what any of it means, but you should probably watch.
With producer Phil Spector, the singer Darlene Love made exactly one
timeless pop song, 1963’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” She sang
the song on Letterman every year for almost 30 years. But mostly, she’s spent the the decades since then working as a backup singer. On the new album Introducing Darlene Love,
though, she’ll step back into the spotlight. Longtime E Street Band
guitarist Steven Van Zandt produced the album, and people like Bruce
Springsteen contributed new songs to it. And as Billboard points out,
the video for the single “Forbidden Nights” features Love driving
around Asbury Park, New Jersey and encountering people like Springsteen,
Van Zandt, Elvis Costello, Joan Jett, Patty Sciafa, Paul Shaffer (with a
surfboard!), Bill Murray, and a white-bearded post-retirement
Letterman.
The video for A$AP Rocky’s Miguel/Mark Ronson/Rod Stewart collab “Everyday”
is billed as A Hip-Hop Hollywood story. It imagines a
not-that-outlandish future in which Rocky is old, fat, and famous enough
to have a Vegas residency and his very own star on the Walk Of Fame. At
the end it transitions to modern day scenes of Ronson in the studio
(where else?) and Rocky kicking it with Miguel. Stewart makes a cameo
too, but I’m having trouble figuring out how he fits into the narrative.
Emmanuel Cossu and Fleur & Manu directed the big-budget At.Long.Last.A$AP clip, which premiered today at Apple Music.
T.I. and Young Thug are both Atlanta rap stars, but their styles are
so radically different that it’s always a nice surprise to hear how
strong their on-record chemistry is. The two joined forces, not that
long ago for “Off-Set,” a song from the Furious 7 soundtrack. The song banged, but it was totally overshadowed by Wiz
Khalifa’s culturally ubiquitous soundtrack contribution “See You Again.”
So it’s cool that the song suddenly has a video, one that mixes clips
from the (awesome) movie with (also-awesome) footage of Thug and T.I.
performing animatedly while standing near expensive cars and flame
trails. Let’s all take a moment for how hilarious it is that Vin
Diesel’s character Dom Toretto named his desert drag-racing event “Race
Wars.”
Brooklyn’s Low Fat Getting High have been in and around the scene for
awhile now, despite the fact that the band has been splitting time
working between the borough and Denver. Their latest self-titled album
was released last year, and “Start All Over” again was one of its
singles. The band enlisted Stephen Tringali to direct a short film to
accompany the song, a cinematographer who’s partially responsible for a
number of videos from Low Fat Getting High’s fellow Northeastern DIY
veterans Roomrunner, Speedy Ortiz, and Big Ups.
In this clip, a serene desert landscape becomes a nightmarish setting
for impending apocalyptic events. It’s a fragmented and intriguing
narrative that poses more questions than answers.
Django Django have just shared a video for “Pause Repeat,” a track from their recently-released sophomore album Born Under Saturn.
The clip was created by bassist Jimmy Nixon with help from director Dan
Brereton, who both turned to the literal meaning of the song’s title
for inspiration and made a stop-motion animated video using a cellphone.
It’s a colorful on.
We named Potty Mouth’s latest single, “Cherry Picking,” one of the best songs of the week
at the beginning of the month, and now the Western Mass-based band has
presented us with an accompanying video. The Eliel Ford-directed short
features members of the band coaxing one of their players out of bed in
order to perform a show in their yard. Potty Mouth is an OG Band To Watch, and their new EP was just released independently on their own Planet Whatever label last week.
On a huge hit a couple of years ago, Taylor Swift clowned an ex for
listening to “some indie record that’s much cooler than mine.” But last
night, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, Swift repped hard for an
indie record. Beck’s new single “Dreams”
might be on a major label, but the fact that Swift is into it might be
the best evidence yet that she has an inner college-radio dork. And
during her show last night, she brought out Beck and St.
Vincent to perform the song with her. Swift respects artistry! Swift has
a sort of six-degrees-of-separation connection with Annie Clark; she’s
friends with the supermodel Cara Delevingne, who’s reportedly dating
Clark. And Clark looked like an absolute badass on her stage, busting
out a quick guitar solo while pyro showered down behind her. Also,
“Dreams” sounded pretty great in an arena-pop context!
Everybody’s Coming Down is the fifth album from Cursive frontman Tim Kasher’s other band the Good Life, but it’s their first in seven years. “The Troubadour’s Green Room”
is a wry indie-folker off the record about wonder, expectations and
reality, and how they rarely match up. Today they’ve shared a crisp,
line-drawn animation by Bryan Brinkman to accompany the song.
UK producer Floating Points has released an epic and elegant video
for his new track “Silhouettes,” a selection from his upcoming new album
Elaenia. Judging by the extensive credits list over on
Youtube, this one was quite the big production, and it shows: The video
follows some shimmering lines of light as they meet, form, and ricochet
around beautiful shots of nature. “An oscillating stream of light
attempts to intrude on an arid natural landscape, abstract light and a
living environment merge, reacting to the dynamics of the music,”
directors Pablo Barquín and Junior Martínez explain. “The luminous
abstract forms are produced by a light painting machine that, frame by
frame, draws in a real environment the 3D animated figures.”
A message from the Directors: An oscillating stream of light attempts to intrude on an arid natural landscape, abstract light and a living environment merge, reacting to the dynamics of the music. The luminous abstract forms are produced by a light painting machine that, frame by frame, draws in a real environment the 3D animated figures. This is an experimental video created by Pablo Barquín, Junior Martínez, Nathan Grimes and Anna Diaz Ortuño.
The existence of Gunplay’s hard-as-Gibraltar street-rap album Living Legend still feels somewhat miraculous, so it’s my pleasure to remind you that
it exists. The Miami wild man’s video for Triple C’s collaboration
“From The Jump” is today’s occasion for such a reminder. It’s your
standard trap-house rap video, but the song itself is a thumping,
fast-paced adrenaline rush that deserves your attention.
A couple of months ago, Lil Wayne shared “Nothing But Trouble,” a song from the soundtrack to the drum machine documentary 808 in which Wayne and the “irredeemably obnoxious”
young crooner Charlie Puth warn of the dangers of falling for Instagram
models. Now the track has a matching video featuring Wayne, Puth, and a
bunch of sexy bikini-clad babes who turn out to be literally
two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. The clip debuted on Apple Music, and
you can watch it below.
Anytime Method Man and Redman are onscreen, you should absolutely
watch whatever is happening, especially if what’s happening is the movie
How High. Method Man just released the new album The Meth Lab, and his old collaborator Funk Doctor Spock turned up on the single “Straight Gutta,”
as did fellow veterans Streetlife and Hanz On. All four of them are in
the new “Straight Gutta” video, an enjoyably grimy affair that takes
place in neighborhoods around Staten Island and features Redman looking
skinnier than I’ve ever seen him. Maybe I’m just not used to seeing him
in tight T-shirts?.
Here’s just about the least likely combination of rock stars you’ll
find on stage together: Last Thursday, a few days after Blink-182’s Mark
Hoppus joined Mumford & Sons for a Eurythmics cover,
the whole lot of them reconvened at the Troubadour in Los Angeles for a
private KROQ show along with Americana overlord T-Bone Burnett and Rage
Against The Machine guitar wizard Tom Morello. And as Reddit
points out, they played a very sloppy and off-key (but undoubtedly
joyous) version of Blink’s “What’s My Age Again?” together. Watch
fan-made footage below, and just imagine what Burnett and Morello must
have been thinking.
The Weeknd teamed with music video director extraordinaire Grant Singer, a close collaborator of Sky Ferreira and Ariel Pink, on his instantly iconic “Can’t Feel My Face” video. The pair have collaborated again on visuals for “Tell Your Friends,” the Kanye West-produced Beauty Behind The Madness single. The desert crime drama calls to mind Kanye’s own “Flashing
Lights” video as well as Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” with Abel Tesfaye
eerily burying one person alive and shooting another dead before
cruising off into the darkness.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O released her skeletal acoustic solo album Crush Songs last year, and she’s made videos for its songs “Ooo” and “Day Go By.” And as Pitchfork points out, director Asli Baykal
has just made a new clip for “Singalong.” It’s about two minutes long,
and it consists entirely of footage, on ancient-looking film stock, of
people in New York City living out their own private little stories.
It’s nice.
Savages bassist Ayşe Hassan has a new side project called Kite Base, a duo that also features fellow bassist Kendra Frost. “Dadum,” the band’s first single, is an excellently anxious piece of postpunk. And now director Sam Dunn
has made a video for the track, a nervous meditation on origami that
features time-lapse images of a sure hand sketching cranes and flowers.
Tom Krell opens his new How To Dress Well video with a message: “As I
write this today my album turns 1 year old. The last year has been so
amazing — I love you all so, so, so much! Everyone I met all over the
world touring this record was so cute, so sweet, and so fun — I just
wanted to return the favor.” What follows is footage taken during an
afternoon in Toronto back in June, with Krell singing “What Is This Heart?” track “Precious Love” on a couch, surrounded by his bandmates and friends.
UK duo Fine Print are putting out their debut EP later this week. So far, we’ve heard “Can’t Lie” and “Tell Me,”
and over the weekend they shared another new one called “About You”
complete with a glossy NSFW music video. It was directed by Adam Powell —
who is also behind Charli XCX’s “Doing It” video with Rita Ora and Jessie Ware’s “You & I (Forever)”
— and takes place on a sunny L.A. day during what looks to be a porn
shoot. The fuzzy camera and general skeeviness of the whole affair
implies that they’re subtly commenting on the male gaze, but it was also
directed by a man so take from that what you will!
The definitive Britpop movie will probably always be Trainspotting (with apologies to style-inspiration grandaddy Quadrophenia). But a new black comedy/thriller called Kill Your Friends aims to unseat it. As The Playlist reports, the movie takes place during the high mid-’90s era of the genre, and it stars Nicholas Hoult, from Mad Max: Fury Road and the fun-as-hell British TV show Skins,
as a ruthless A&R man on the prowl through the scene. James Corden
and Craig Roberts also star, and the TV veteran Owen Harris directed it.
The great Portland indie-band Pure Bathing Culture, a onetime BTW, will release their new album Pray For Rain, the follow-up to 2013’s Moon Tides, this fall. And as The FADER points out, they’ve just shared the video for the album’s slick title track. The video is a streamlined, neon-lit ’80s-style fantasia, one made with the same visual palette as the movie Drive. It starts out with a lapdance, which seems simple enough, but there are a couple of psychological twists in there. Greg Hardes and Jacob Proud direct.
Last night in Seattle, a quartet of local luminaries gathered on the
rooftop of the famous local landmark Pike Place Market to pay tribute to
punk rock overlords Iggy & The Stooges. The band was all heavy
hitters: Mudhoney frontman Mark Arm, Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready,
Screaming Trees/Mad Season/Skin Yard drummer Barrett Martin, and
remarkably well-preserved Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan, who’s
allowed to count as grunge because he’s from Seattle and he was in the
Fastbacks. Together, they played a set of seven Stooges songs as a
fundraiser for the Pike Up! Capital Campaign, which is raising money for
a new MarketFront entrance. Watch a bunch of videos below.
Diplo has dropped two new tracks on us just in time for the weekend
party rush. One’s a collaboration with Canadian producer Sleepy Tom and
an unknown vocalist called “Be Right There” that was dubbed Annie Mac’s
latest Hottest Record on BBC Radio 1. “Set Me Free” is the other one,
and it features LIZ, who we just interviewed recently about her new solo single. The latter comes attached to a
video that emphasizes the deep drop in the chorus, and the former track
features a similar breakdown. Guess that’s Diplo’s latest thing!
Last summer, we fell in love with the ’60s-inspired indie pop sounds of Literature’s sophomore release Chorus.
Today, the Philadelphia quartet is premiering their new music video for
“The Girl, The Gold Watch, And Everything,” a track off Chorus.
The video, directed by Jack Wagner, features the band having a grand
ol’ time just playing their music, which, in my opinion, is the best
type of music video. Literature are currently on a short tour with
Baltimore’s Expert Alterations. The two groups are putting out a split 7″ together soon on Square Of Opposition Records.
At its heart, Hunter S. Thompson’s 1971 non-fiction work Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas
is a pointed critique of the mythology of the American Dream, but that
deeper meaning is easily obstructed by the copious amounts of substances
he consumes throughout. The threatening desert sprawl of Las Vegas
morphs into a surreal, mostly creepy technicolor waking dream, one that
the Underachievers imitate well in their new video for three songs off
of their forthcoming album Evermore: The Art of Duality:
“Chasing Faith,’ “Rain Dance,” and “Allusions.” The duo drive through
the desert on the outskirts of Vegas in a bright pink Cadillac, not
dissimilar to the one that Ralph Steadman illustrated for the first
scene of Thompson’s book. Their savage journey begins with a hit of acid
and doesn’t let up until all three songs are over; watch the
YASHXANA-directed video.
The most intriguing part of the Weeknd’s Beauty Behind The Madness tracklist
is “Prisoner,” the duet with Lana Del Rey. They make a head-slappingly
obvious pairing for reasons already expressed by Tom: “The Weeknd and
Lana Del Rey both sing slow, sad, narcotically tinged songs about the
toll of the party lifestyle, and both of them somehow make that work in a
pop context.” That duet has made its way online, and yeah, these two
are a perfect fit. “Prisoner” feels like an old Weeknd mixtape track,
but with touches of Del Rey’s doomed noir glamor. You can listen to the
track over on Tumblr.
Future’s great new album DS2 debuted at #1 on the Billboard chart last month, and now he’s just debuted the video for the Drake-featuring cut “Where Ya At”
on an actual billboard in Times Square. Directed by Rick Nyce, the clip
shows Future, Metro Boomin, and DJ Esco having their own little dance
party on a rooftop before Future and Drake suit up for a very
important-looking business dinner.
Earlier this month, we got a teaser
for what seemed like a “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Wanna Go To
The Party” video, where Courtney Barnett lays in bed and can’t manage to
get up, but it looks like that was just a red herring. Instead, that
video was just a promotional tool to announce a pop-up show in London’s
Camden Town Plaza, and that’s where the official video was shot earlier
this week. Barnett and her band set up in front of a billboard declaring
the name of the track in If You’re Reading This-style
handwriting, and went to town. Director Jon White combines some
professionally shot footage with some cellphone clips to create an
accurate portrayal of the craziness of what it must have been like to be
there in person.
DRYNX is a mysterious and deeply silly new project from Lansing-Dreiden/Violens mastermind and prolific indie-world producer Jorge Elbrecht. The recently surprise-released Imperial Blastman
is all dinky, kitschy absurdity, and that absurdity is on full,
glorious display in the new video for “Black Goblin.” The song itself
interpolates and references ’80s classics like “You Can Call Me Al,”
“Ghostbusters,” and “Puttin’ On The Ritz,” swapping out some words for
new and improved goblin-lyrics, and the video features the enigmatic
DRYNX man himself (actually Elbrecht’s non-musician friend Kevin
Faerkin, a former GM of NYC’s Grand Central Oyster Bar) rocking the same outfit seen on the album cover.
When it appeared on Riff Raff’s 2014 album Neon Icon, the song “Wetter Than Tsunami” did not feature a Danny Brown guest verse. Now, all of a sudden it does have a Danny Brown guest verse, and it works as confirmation that any
song can be made better with a Danny Brown guest verse. Brown co-stars
with a newly bulked-up Riff Raff in director Tom Larkin’s new “Wetter
Than Tsunami” video, as do a giraffe, a bunch of women in bikinis, a
whole lot of goofy computer effects, and some kind of Monster Energy
Drink bazooka.
Brooklyn experimental rock group Grooms put out their new album, Comb The Feelings Through Your Hair, earlier this year, and they’ve just shared a video for the title track.
Directed by Cora Foxx, it features a bubblegum pink vat of water where
random items are thrown into and pulled out of the goo. It’s a
mesmerizing visual that’s easy to get lost in and, just when it feels
like it centers on a girl in the muck, she’s quickly abstracted and
submerged as well.
Marching Church is the experimental side project of Iceage’s Elias
Bender Rønnenfelt, and back in March, he released a new album titled This World Is Not Enough
on Brooklyn’s Sacred Bones Records. The project is a musical endeavor
that’s also heavily focused on visual aesthetics, and we’ve seen two
videos inspired by the songs “Hungry For Love” as well as “King Of Song.” Rønnenfelt released a new video via Spin for This World Is Not Enough’s
song “Your Father’s Eyes” today, which was directed by Marching
Church’s Kristian Emdal. Watch as Rønnenfelt looks back on the past.
High, the new album from Aussie soul-punks Royal Headache, comes out in a couple of days. And if early tracks “High” and “Another World”
weren’t enough to convince you to check it out, allow us to recommend
the band’s great new video for the brisk wailer “Carolina.” In the clip,
frontman Shogun finds himself too energetic and passionate to stay in
one room during a band practice, and he ends up running wild through the
streets of the band’s Sydney hometown. It’s a fast, stylish video, made
with heart but conscious of the fact that it should make the band look
cool. It’s the sort of video that makes a good song suddenly feel like a
great one. Damian Sawyers directs.
Last week, Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) released a new track called
“Basquiat Ghostwriter,” which he says was inspired by the titular
artist’s paintings and notebook sketches, the latter of which have been
on display since April in an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. (If you’re in the area and haven’t gotten a
chance to check that out, go! It closes this Sunday.) Bey’s video for
the track, which was directed by production company A Country Called
Earth, incorporates footage of Jean-Michel Basquiat working alongside
some shots of Bey recording in the studio, all washed out in a negative
effect.
London-based Aloric play a brand of experimental rock that juxtaposes
the hard and the soft, one that exists somewhere on the Radiohead/FKA
twigs/Aphex Twin spectrum. The initial impression of their video for
“Who?” is of a dark eeriness but that changes as the focus turns to
exposed shots of people. Each black and white solo shot looks sad and
harsh. Their expressions are blank yet feel naked. There’s never a time
when you really look at a stranger’s neck, eyes, lips or even simply
their face so closely. It’s filmed in a way where the subtle shifts in
focus mimic how an eye would — as if guiding the viewer across these
faces with their intense gazes. The end results in a collection of their
expressionless faces in a monstrous collage. Jessica Dowse directs.
Atlanta’s foremost sardonic-trap rapper Father just threw a new EP on the internet this week, the five-song Papicodone. He’s already released Young Hot Ebony and Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?
over the course of the last 12 months, and you start to get the feeling
he’s got countless tracks on deck and he’s just biding his time,
spacing them out. Anyway, the posse track from this latest bunch
features the staccato growl of Archibald Slim, the sleepy-eyed drawl of
Ethereal, Father’s own no-fucks-given hedonism, and iLoveMakonnen on a
boastful syrupy hook. If that sounds like overkill, it isn’t — a spare
beat and tinkling, dark sirens balance out the packed guest list. Watch
closely for cameos from past Awful films and aspiring young bloggers. They like to keep it all in the family, after all.
“Restless” is the first song that we’ve heard off of New Order’s forthcoming LP, Music Complete,
which marks their first album in a decade. The record will be released
next month, but in the meantime, New Order have shared a video for that
debut single. Directed by NYSU, the visual accompaniment to “Restless”
is befitting of its name; each shot traverses different stylistic
leanings, jumping from found footage to medieval sword-in-the-stone-type
scenes to a celestial rave and back again.
The Seattle pop group Beat Connection have a new album called Product 3 coming out, and for their first single, they’ve offered up “So Good,” a song that ripples like a mirage. Daniel Kaufman
filmed the song’s brand-new video, taping it on California’s Route 66
and staging it so that it would look like a single unbroken take, though
it’s definitely not one. The video uses camera trickery to make people
at a pool turn into other people at a pool, and it stars, among
others, Rick Wilder, the extremely distinctive-looking California rock
veteran who’s appeared in recent videos from Ariel Pink and the Weeknd.
Clash Music premiered the video, and you can check it out below.
The onetime electroclash star Peaches has a new album called Rub
coming out, and the single “Close Up” pair her with Kim Gordon,
formerly of Sonic Youth and currently of Body/Head. In director Vice Cooler’s
new “Close Up” video, Peaches becomes a pro wrestler, and Gordon plays
her madly vaping manager. The clip stars the wrestlers of the
theatrically kitschy indie wrestling/burlesque promotion Lucha VaVoom,
including Cassandro and Joey Ryan. And as far as I can tell, Peaches
takes real wrestling moves from real wrestlers in the clip, which is
impressive. The clip also has enough bodily-fluid humor to render it
NSFW.
Dungen will release a new album called Allas Sak this September on the Brooklyn mainstay Mexican Summer, the band’s first release since 2010’s Skit I Allt. We heard “Åkt Dit” back in June, and today they’ve released the latest single via Noisey.
“Franks Kaktus” comes accompanied by a public access television show
clip, which features members of the band performing alongside bizarre
found footage with a dated ’70s aesthetic
The Chicago footwork originator DJ Rashad died suddenly
last year, but the music he left behind is still coming out. “Dubby,” a
track that he made with frequent collaborator DJ Spinn, manages to
combine footwork with old-school jungle music, chopped-up jazz, and a
ferocious vocal from guest Danny Brown. As Gorilla Vs. Bear points out, it’ll appear on Spinn’s forthcoming Off That Loud EP. The track’s new video, from director Ashes57 is mostly mythic-looking black-and-white footage of the city of Chicago
and of members of Rashad’s Teklife crew. There are some breathtaking
dance sequences in there, too.
Indie-pop experimenter Mica Levi has been off in the film-score
universe for a while, but her band Micachu & The Shapes are about to
return with the new album Good Sad Happy Bad. We’ve already heard their songs “Oh Baby” and “Sad,” and now they’ve made a video for another new one, a skeletal two-minute number called “Sea Air.” James and Mark Hankins directed the video, which is entirely made up of a long slow-motion shot of a babyfaced drummer getting busy.
We’ve already heard BJ the Chicago Kid’s temptation-resisting “Church” and the slick “Nothin But Love” from his anticipated album In My Mind.
Now comes the video for “That Girl” featuring OG Maco to keep us
anxious for the album’s arrival. The clip has bubble font lyrics popping
up around gorgeous aerial shots of Chicago. It’s filled with bright
hued transitions using patterned kaleidoscope effects with more bubble
lyrics and a sultry dancing silhouetted woman. BJ the Chicago Kid and OG
Maco also make an appearance in the color-filtered video, which you can
watch.
Danish prog-rockers Mew have shared a new video for one of the songs off their excellent new album + -.
This album is one of their lushest releases to date, and “The Night
Believer” illustrates that with colorful, crisp cartoonish visuals by
Will Hodge and Lianne Pierce. The video depicts a whole zoo-full of
animals riding in cars and exploring the countryside and foiling the
plans of a mean-spirited robot. Watch.
Beirut announced their return a few months ago by sharing “No No No,” the title track from their first album since 2011’s The Rip Tide. They followed that up with the song’s video
and have shared another song today along with an accompanying video.
“Gibraltar” floats by on Zach Condon’s reliably golden, humming tenor,
plenty of congos, claps, and flitting keyboard. In the clip, the band
wanders across beaches and trails on an island that is sadly marred by
plenty of human trash. What they stumble upon in the final scene is
worth watching all the way through for, though, so check out the Brother Willis-directed video.
On Friday, Gangrene, the duo of Alchemist and Oh No, released the nasty psych-rap album You Disgust Me.
The best album on the track might’ve been “Sheet Music,” a no-nonsense
neck-snapper that featured verses from Mobb Deep member Havoc and from
the late Sean Price, who died
just before the album was released and whose verse, with its line about
punching you in your face just for living, was my favorite on the
album. Director Jason Goldwatch made a video for “Sheet Music,” and it works as a dedication to Price,
showing nothing more than Alchemist and Oh No sitting in front of a
burnt-out, graffiti-covered building while smoke billows out of the
door.
“You’re no goalie, you feel it sailing over your head,” Russian
American Olga Bell sings over a minimalistic, dreamy beat in her new,
very literal music video. Bell, a label mate of Björk’s, is following up
her LP Krai from last year, entirely sung in Russian, with an EP called Incitation this fall. Turns out her voice is just as gorgeous in English as it is in Russian. Bell, a current member of the Dirty Projectors, told Nowness that her upcoming EP is “almost a solo howl. It’s an explanation of
things that really upset me, like failure and rejection, and the fact
that your time is slipping away.” Bell and Christina Ladwig co-directed
the video.
After dropping a bunch of very goodone-off tracks in the past few months, Black Hippy tough Jay Rock has finally announced his sophomore album 90059, named for the Compton/Watts zip code. We’ve already heard the eerie, unhinged title track,
and now it’s been given a new video directed by PANAMÆRA and the Little
Homies. The video actually features a few minutes of new music,
beginning with a slightly ominous instrumental intro and then segueing
into a short, warmly psychedelic, and very funky track by astral R&B
singer and TDE labelmate SZA. SZA also co-stars in the video, driving
Jay Rock around while he’s restrained by a straitjacket and a Hannibal
Lecter-esque bite mask. When she finally unleashes him, he pops a few
adrenaline pills and launches into the frenzied “90059.”
Atlanta superproducer Mike WiLL Made-It has just shared a new video for “Drinks On Us,” a track off of last year’s Ransom
mixtape featuring Rae Sremmurd’s Swae Lee and Future. In the Matt
Swinsky-directed clip, they all hit the club with a few famous friends —
Miley Cyrus, Juicy J, French Montana, Wale, and the Washington Wizards’
John Wall all make cameos — while some female bandits also hit the club. Nudity and gun violence ensues. Watch.
DJDS (formerly DJ Dodger Stadium) are the duo of producers Jerome LOL
and Samo Sound Boy, and last year, they released the excellent emotive
house album Friend Of Mine. (Samo also dropped an impressive solo LP called Begging Please
earlier this year.) Today, they’re back with a new track and a video
for it. The song is “You Don’t Have to Be Alone,” a warm and lush dance
track very much in the vein of the stuff on Friend Of Mine. And the video, from directors Daniel Pappas and Nick Walker,
tells the story of a beautiful white dog (or maybe an Arctic wolf?) as
it goes on a solo journey through a suburban residential neighborhood.
The video has a very satisfying conclusion, and you can check.
When Toronto’s Death From Above 1979 reunited to release last year’s The Physical World,
the welcome news of their return warranted a documentary about what the
band had been doing in the interim period between 2004’s You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine and their new album. Life After Death From Above 1979
came out last year and told the story of the band’s rise, fall, and
reconciliation. Tour footage abounds throughout, and the new video for
the song “White Is Red” features a compilation of rapid-fire scenes from
the film. Eva Michon directs.
Tame Impala previewed their video for Currents’ opening epic “Let It Happen”
last week, and now the final cut has arrived. The video’s protagonist
blurs the line between nervous breakdown, medical crisis, and
hallucination, most memorably when he finds himself strapped to an
airplane seat falling through the sky. David Wilson directed the clip.
Born In The Echoes, the Chemical Brothers’ first album since 2012’s Don’t Think, was released earlier this summer and had been announced with a BBC Radio 1 premiere of “Sometimes I Feel So Deserted” way back in April. Michel Gondry directed Born In Echoes’ first video of a dystopian color guard team marching through a bleak, grey
landscape. This new video follows in a similar vein, but is definitely
more gruesome. A mutilated woman (zombie?) drags herself through the
desert before hydrating herself with gasoline by inserting an antiquated
pump into her throat. Maybe it’s some kind of socio-political
commentary, but mostly, it just looks really fucking cool.
Jack White and Alison Mosshart announced last month that their supergroup side project the Dead Weather would release their third full-length, Dodge And Burn,
later this year, following a period of a year-and-a-half where they
teased it with a bunch of one-off singles. Today, they’ve shared a new
song from it called “I Feel Love (Every Million Miles)” along with an
accompanying video. The only downside is that it’s currently a TIDAL
exclusive, which means that pretty much no one will be able to watch
until it eventually gets a wider release. If you happen to have TIDAL,
you can watch and listen to the whole thing here.
Seattle-via-South Carolina singer-songwriter Austin Crane named his musical project Valley Maker after a Smog song,
and he lists people like Will Oldham and Cat Power as influences. That
should convey some of the rustic, sad-eyed folk sensibility he’s working
with. On “Only Friend,” the first song from upcoming Valley Maker album
When I Was A Child, Crane meditates on faith and his Southern
upbringing over a constant ripple of acoustic guitar, gentle but
insistent, while Amy Godwin lends his plaintive voice a ghostly echo.
The video, directed by Joseph Kolean, matches the track’s sparse
melancholy with a quick succession of shots of natural landscapes.
A couple of days ago, Deerhunter launched a mysterious countdown
until 11PM tonight on their website. At first we thought that it might
be counting down to the release of their new, not even officially
announced yet album Fading Frontier, but now all (or at least
some) has been revealed: Starting at 11PM EDT this evening, frontman
Bradford Cox will be hosting a surprise two-hour radio show on Atlanta’s
AM 1690. The program will also be streamed live on their site here (click on the Jesus painting to listen).
But more importantly, ahead of that, the first song from Fading Frontier
has already surfaced online. “Snakeskin” is an absolute jam, a
grooving, straight-up funky track that still keeps one foot in the
shadows thanks to a skittering rattlesnake beat and Cox’s sinister
lyrics: “I was born already nailed to the cross/ I was born with a
feeling I was lost.” And because this is Deerhunter, the whole thing
slides into a spacey sound collage over an extended vamp at the end.
UPDATE: Just after midnight, Cox played “Snakeskin” on his radio show and confirmed that Fading Frontier will be out 10/16 on 4AD. It’s also up for pre-order at iTunes and through the label. That’s the cover art above, a photograph called “Zuma” by John Divola. Here’s the tracklist:
01 “All The Same”
02 “Living My Life”
03 “Breaker”
04 “Duplex Planet”
05 “Take Care”
06 “Leather And Wood”
07 “Snakeskin”
08 “As Astra”
09 “Carrion”
All songs were written by Bradford Cox except “Ad Astra,” which was
written by Lockett Pundt. Cox and Pundt duet on “Breaker,” a first for
Deerhunter. Broadcast’s James Cargill contributed synthesizers and tape
manipulation to “Take Care,” Stereolab’s Tim Gane plays electric
harpsichord on “Duplex Planet,” and Zumi Rosow is on treated alto sax on
“Snakeskin.” The band co-produced Fading Frontier with Ben H. Allen III, who helmed 2010’s Halcyon Digest.
A press release promises “something strikingly balanced, focused on
melody and texture” as well as brighter production than 2013’s Monomania and “the band’s most complex yet accessible work to date.”
The band have also shared the official video for “Snakeskin,” directed by Valentina Tapia.
Next month, we’ll get to hear Chvrches’ much-anticipated sophomore album Every Open Eye. Thus far, though, they’ve only shared two songs, “Leave A Trace” and “Never Ending Circles.”
This morning, they’ve shared the video for “Leave A Trace,” the
incandescent first single. It’s a fairly bare-bones video, with no real
central concept or anything. The whole clip is made up of shots of the
band (with all emphasis on frontwoman Lauren Mayberry) walking on water
with dramatic sky billowing behind then. But it works, anyway, because
Mayberry is one of our most charismatic frontpeople right now and
because she goes all-out on glamour in this one.
Today is Young Thug’s birthday (happy birthday Thug!), and to celebrate,
the insanely prolific Atlanta rap livewire is doing what he does best:
releasing new music. That means we’re getting a new video for the Gucci
Mane-featuring “Again,” off of Thug and producer London On Da Track’s
still-delayed mixtape Slime Season. Directed by Cam Kirk and co-directed by the usual team of Young Thug and Be El Be, the clip was filmed at Kirk’s Gucci Mane “Trap God” installation,
which means it features a bunch of scantily clad women cooking drugs in
a church converted into a trap house. Metro Boomin also makes a cameo,
although Gucci, of course, is still in jail and couldn’t make it.
It’s been five years since British heavy metal gods Iron Maiden released a new album, 2010’s The Final Frontier,
and it’s not unreasonable to have low expectations for fresh music from
any band FOUR DECADES into its career. But after a nadir that spanned
all of the 1990s, Maiden have been on a relative upswing this
millennium: Their last four albums were also their best four albums
since 1988’s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son — and The Final Frontier was the best of that entire batch. (Check out our Counting Down ranking of all Iron Maiden’s albums from worst to best
for a more detailed explication of this analysis.) That said, there’s
plenty of reason to be trepidatious about Maiden’s upcoming The Book Of Souls: It’s Maiden’s first studio double album (!); its 18-minute closing track, “Empire Of The Clouds,” is four-and-a-quarter minutes
longer than the band’s longest track to date, 1984’s “Rime Of The
Ancient Mariner,” and there’s another song on here (“When The River Runs
Deep”) that’s only 12 seconds shorter than “Rime”; and the whole thing
comes only months after frontman Bruce Dickinson was successfully treated for cancer (a tumor found on his tongue, no less). But today, the band release the first single from The Book Of Souls,
“Speed Of Light,” which should help to momentarily ease any such
trepidation. The track (which comes in at a comparatively infinitesimal
5:01) was written by Dickinson and guitarist Adrian Smith, the same
songwriting team that gave us such irreducible monuments as “2 Minutes
To Midnight” and “The Flight Of Icarus.” I’m not gonna suggest that
“Speed Of Light” is on that level, but then again, nothing else is on
that level. This is still pretty goddamn good. .
The Book Of Souls tracklist:
Disc 1
01 “If Eternity Should Fail”
02 “Speed Of Light”
03 “The Great Unknown”
04 “The Red And The Black”
05 “When The River Runs Deep”
06 “The Book Of Souls”
Disc 2
07 “Death Or Glory”
08 “Shadows Of The Valley”
09 “Tears Of A Clown”
10 “The Man Of Sorrows”
11 “Empire Of The Clouds”
The Book Of Souls is out 9/4, and you can pre-order it here.
Elliot Moss sounds like the love child of Bon Iver and James Blake,
so if you’re into either of those artists, you shouldn’t hesitate to
check out his album Highspeeds.
Maybe that’s an obvious comparison, but it’s accurate af, and you know
it. Moss’ voice hovers over his crystalline production like flotsam, and
David Svedosh’s video for “Slip” is a gorgeous, brooding meditation on
the chasm between the natural world and the human spirit.
Metric have just shared a video for their Pagans In Vegas single “The Shade.”
In it, the band performs on a roof while a series of images showing
both the beauty and ugly side of human nature stutter along to the beat.
“We live in a world inundated with imagery,” Emily Haines told Rolling Stone.
“Pictures, videos and graphics permeate our consciousness all hours of
the day. That’s what we wanted to capture in ‘The Shade’: humanity and
nature caught in patterns and loops of beauty, destruction and decay.”
There’s some lame shit here — see someone burning a copy of a Billboard
parody chart called The Bored 100, but mostly the stop-and-start
graphics weirdly made me appreciate the song a little more for what it
is. Your mileage may vary — check it.
FIDLAR’s latest track “Drone” premiered on Beats1 just yesterday,
but the band has already shared a video to go along with it. Directed
by Ryan Baxley in grainy 4:3, the four FIDLAR dudes star as aliens
chasing a Paranoid Man around the city in an effort to steal his brain.
It’s a fun video that captures the track’s nervous energy over not
wanting to be a societal drone anymore.
Look, maybe this isn’t fair. Maybe a 17-minute art film that includes five different
music videos shouldn’t be judged on the same merits as a traditional
music video, especially when that art film already includes one (two?)
of the year’s best previously-existing videos within its whole. But this
whole thing is just a staggering achievement. The angler-fish demon
lady? The haunting final blow-up doll image? The uncanny transitions
between very different visions? The pitch-perfect riff on that great
late-’90s moment when every R&B video took place in a spaceship? The
terrifying pregnancy imagery? The voguing? The way the whole video
makes you want to have sex and also never have sex again? I can see why
Robert Pattinson gets along with this lady so well. She’s the next David
Cronenberg.
Joanna Newsom – “Sapokanikan” (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Paul Thomas Anderson has seen enough movies, and worked with enough
movie stars, to know when he should just step back and let someone’s
charisma do all the work. And Joanna Newsom has that rare power to seem
like a person out of time and space, able to walk down a busy New York
street looking like a unicorn skipping through a meadow. The way the
light works in the video is just spectacular; you could spend hours just
marveling at what those fire-engine reds do to Newsom’s face. The fact
that this video is not #1 is just absurd, and I apologize.
The World Is A Beautiful Place And I Am No Longer Afraid To Die – “January 10, 2014″ (Dir. Christopher Good)
A fairly rote story of a despicable predator suddenly turns
disorienting and mystical, full of Wiccan sorceresses and death
premonitions. Like the band that made it, this video gets away with its
pretensions by offering something of real power alongside them.
To celebrate the release of Palehound’s great debut album Dry Food (which comes out today), Ellen Kempner has shared a video for “Healthier Folk.” Faye Orlove — Fvck The Media’s creative director and the person behind great recent videos for Mitski and Downtown Boys
— directs, and she takes on beauty standards with a surgical gross-out
flair. From trying to light a Barbie doll on fire with a magnifying
glass to smearing lotion all over an iPhone, the whole video has a
quality that makes it so you don’t want to look away. Check it out via Paper Mag below.
For the giddy banger “Doctor Pepper,”
Diplo assembled a truly absurd team of talents — Korean pop superstar
and 2NE1 leader CL, Atlanta rap wildman OG Maco, a newly bulked-up Riff
Raff — and somehow put together one of the most ridiculously catchy and
energetic turn-up anthems of the summer. And now, schedules have aligned
enough that all these people have gotten together to make a fittingly
ridiculous video. The four stars of the song spend much of the clip in
and around a massive bright-green stretch Hummer. The video also
features surreal floating shapes, rented-mansion parties, and a whole
army of butts. The filmmaking collective Uzi directed the video.
N.W.A. are in the air right now. The much-ballyhooed N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton is premiering tomorrow, Dr. Dre just released his long-awaited new solo album, and now, just one day after Ice Cube said some gross, kinda misogynistic stuff
about women and N.W.A., tough-as-hell female Chicago rappers Katie Got
Bandz, Sasha Go Hard, Chella H, and Lucci Vee have teamed up as W.W.A. —
which stands, of course, for Women With Attitude. They’ve just dropped
their debut song and video, “Straight Outta Chicago,” in which they rep
Chicago over a “Straight Outta Compton”-alike beat from Emmaculate. APJ
Films directs.
“All I wanna do is get high by the beach” is Lana Del Rey’s mantra
throughout her muted, hip-hop-inflected new single. At first glance, the
“High By The Beach” video appears to grant her wish, comprising glamour
shots of Del Rey languishing in a luxurious coastline property while a
helicopter lingers nearby. Things take a turn for the intriguing halfway
through: She rushes down to the oceanside to grab a guitar case, which
turns out to contain a rocket launcher. You can guess where things go
from there. It’s an awesomely memorable video.
The Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach has a new side project called
the Arcs, and he’s getting ready to release their debut album Yours, Dreamily in a few weeks. We’ve posted their songs “Stay In My Corner” and “Outta My Mind,”
and now they’ve shared a video for a third, “Put A Flower In Your
Pocket.” The song, like the others, is a slow and sweaty blues-rocker,
and it sounds very much like a Black Keys song. El Oms directed the
video, an animated noir story about anthropomorphic ape people. It
starts out with a boxing match and gets much, much more violent from
there.
Last night, Hot Chip stopped by Conan to play the funky clavinet jam “Started Right” off of their new album Why Make Sense?, and today, the song’s been given a new video directed by Rollo Jackson (who directed their “How Do You Do?” video
back in 2012). It starts out as a simple one-woman karaoke session in
an empty bar, and then turns into something weirder and more
hallucinatory. Watch below.
Arcade Fire’s movie The Reflektor Tapes is set to hit theaters on 9/23, and they’ve just shared the first official trailer for the film following a teaser that was released last month. The film, which was directed by Kahlil Joseph and documents the Reflektor tour, will have its world premiere at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival on 9/12.
“There were parts of the Reflektor tour where I think we,
Arcade Fire, came the closest in our careers to putting on stage what we
imagined in our heads, the band said in a statement. “We were insanely
lucky to have Kahlil Joseph documenting from the very beginning.” You
can view a list of which theaters it will be playing at on release day here.
The Drums’ video for their Encyclopedia track “There Is
Nothing Left” starts off looking like it’ll play out in typical romantic
comedy style before quickly revealing itself to be a horror movie with a
Sasquatch-type creature. But, no, it veers yet again into something
else entirely. It’s a fun video, which was co-directed by David Gantz
and Theo Cohn and stars transgender model Hari Nef. Watch it via Pitchfork below.
And here’s statements from Pierce:
I fell completely in love with these directors and their
whole cinematic aesthetic but I really was not in the mood to be filmed.
I go through seasons of being incredibly shy and self conscious and
then out of nowhere I’ll get a tidal wave of confidence and immediately
make a fool out of myself and everyone in my band. Lucky for all of us, I
was in shy-mode and so I spent my time casting for the video. No one
seemed too exciting to me, and then my friend Ioanna Gika called me and
asked me to join her for a late night drink in L.A. When I got there
Hari was sitting at the table and was radiating. I was immediately
struck with her aura. I fell in love immediately and the next morning
asked her to star in this video. She said yes right away. She’s a punk
and also completely relatable with a strong sense of self and a smile to
crack the earth in half. I’m sure she’s rolling her eyes reading this
right now. We’ve always tried to work with people who are everyday- in
their own way- nudging the world towards being a more accepting place to
live.
And Nef:
Jonny Pierce was the third person I met in Los Angeles
when I moved here for the summer in late June. I found him funny,
magnetic, stylish, and easy to talk to. I was not surprised when I found
out that he was a rock star. When he asked me to feature in the next
video for The Drums, I was surprised. I had never envisioned myself as
the ingenue of a romantic comedy–even a romantic comedy gone wrong. I
related to the video’s notion of embodying cliches in order to break
them. Filming was a treat!
“Desire,” the snarling lead single to Dilly Dally’s debut full-length, Sore,
captures the titular feeling in fits and starts, breaking down all that
want until the only thing that’s left is a dull ache. The video for the
track highlights the roller coaster dips of that particular feeling.
There’s Katie Monks’ wide-eyed, excited expression as she gives it her
all into the mic, there’s cutaways to legs sensually cutting together.
The steady roll of the skateboard that starts the video ends with a
bloody mouth against the concrete after the fall. The video shows off
the good and the bad, in a way that makes it so you can’t take your eyes
off the whole thing.
It’s rough out there, and ’90s alt-rock icons have to stick together.
Maybe that’s why the Smashing Pumpkins and Marilyn Manson, two acts who
never had much in common besides the Lost Highway soundtrack, are touring together
this summer. And on their Sunday night show in Nashville, they also
shared a stage — or, rather, a fake pulpit. Manson introduced his song
“Antichrist Superstar” with a whole satanic-preacher schtick, complete
with burning Bible. And midway through the song, Corgan, in nun drag,
came onstage to duet with Manson on the song. They sounded pretty great
together, too! As it ended, they segued into a brief and whimper-moaned
cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” (They were singing
it as “Nuns Just Wanna Have Fun,” naturally.) Watch a fan-made video
below.
OG Artist To Watch Doe Paoro will release a new album this fall, and we’ve already heard several of its singles. “Growth/Decay,” “The Wind,” and “Traveling” were all released before last week’s “Nostalgia,”
which is in many ways a song about finding the strength to forge ahead
by looking back on the past. The song’s accompanying video finds a group
of dancers performing in a basketball gym as Paoro’s image fades in and
out of focus.
The experimental Memphis noise-rapper Cities Aviv just released his Your Discretion Is Trust
album a few months ago, and he’s just made a new video for one of its
track. “No GMO” is a piece of lurching, thudding rap minimalism built on
little more than an 808 thoom. And its video, from director
Rimar Villaseñor, is just as simple, showing nothing but a
negative-image shot of Cities rapping.
The day my ex-boyfriend and I broke up, we had tickets to a Youth
Lagoon show that we didn’t want to waste. So we went — together — in all
our heartbreak and despair. Before watching Trevor Powers’ new video
for “Highway Patrol Stun Gun,” I never thought listening to the Idaho
artist’s music would ever make me feel anything but “Oh my God I want to
die” again, but I was wrong. Despite the song’s pensive piano and
Powers’ downcast whine, the video, directed by Kendy Ty, features Powers
happily perusing around New York City with a mysterious gold-masked
best friend. “Highway Patrol Stun Gun” is off Youth Lagoon’s upcoming
record Savage Hills Ballroom. Here’s what Powers told The FADER about the video:
“For me [the concept of the video] was this idea of
having this extension of yourself. We go down these life paths and we
feel like we’re always alone, but we have those different aspects of our
personality that are essentially grounding us; we’re not quite alone,
because we have our spirit. It was that idea, combined with the idea of
losing someone and having them still be alive throughout your day to
day–because I think that’s a very real thing. Anyone who’s experienced
any sort of loss, you know you go out on a windy day you feel the wind
on your skin and you feel like they’re still there.”
At the beginning of the year, Austin-based composer Sarah Lipstate released her latest album as Noveller, Fantastic Planet.
It’s a collection of floating, cinematic instrumentals, and now album
track “Pulse Point” has a video to go along with it that matches the
scope and beauty of her own music. Director Matt Kleiner uses Lipstate’s
blank canvas to paint his own picture, one that contains majestically
serene waterscapes and nature shots. It plays out like a breathtaking
National Geographic documentary, and echoes the title of Noveller’s
latest record.
Bleachers, Fun. co-leader Jack Antonoff’s side project group, released the shockingly great debut album Strange Desire a year ago, and it’s been steadily building momentum since then.
Bleachers have lately been on the road heavily, touring with Charli XCX.
And their new video for the particularly Springsteenian song “Like A
River Runs” fits into a venerable old music-video tradition: The
rock-tour clip. This is a great example of the form, using stately
black-and-white and slow motion to pull off the task of making Antonoff
look larger-than-life.
Kanye West co-produced and rapped on the hazy and soul-drenched
“Jukebox Joints,” one of the standout tracks from A$AP Rocky’s excellent
new drug-rap album At.Long.Last.A$AP.
But Kanye doesn’t appear in the video, which cuts the song off before
his verse comes in. Instead, the hallucinatory purple-tinted clip shows
Rocky in a total blur, staggering through parties and nightclubs and
bedrooms and subway stations. It plays more like a psychedelic interlude
from a late-’60s movie than like a standard rap video. Rocky
co-directed the video with Shomi Patwary and AWGE. The clip follows
Rocky’s similarly spacey “L$D” video, and you can watch it below.
Earlier this summer, the great Baton Rouge rapper Boosie Badazz (formerly Lil Boosie) returned to release Touch Down 2 Cause Hell,
his first album after a long incarceration. Thus far, he’s made videos
for a couple of the song’s heaviest, most pathos-ridden songs, “Hands Up” and “I’m Sorry.” But now Nah Right has posted the Walu-directed
clip for one of the album’s few celebratory songs. The “All I Know”
video features the R&B singer PJ and a whole lot of shots of average
people getting ready to leave work. But it also has Boosie getting his
haircut touched up and then hosting what looks like a really fun pool
party at his mansion. It’s hard to tell what the different parts of the
video have to do with each other, but that pool party really looks like
the best time.
Earlier this year, Kate Stables released her gorgeous third album and modern folk gem Bashed Out under the name This Is The Kit. Prior to the release she shared the oceanside video for the album’s title track, playing out as a visual metaphor for internal struggles. Now she has unveiled another video on Noisey for her apocalypse-centered track “Silver John,”
directed by herself and filmed/edited by her husband Jesse D. Vernon
(Morning Star). Stables shows there’s more than meets the eye, as she
serenades to the camera in front of bathroom tiles that transform into
earthy scenes and landscapes. Each cut-up frame blinks through film of
burnt acid pigments, stains of questioned existence whirling all around.
Stables explains that “Silver John” is about how we see things, saying:
The end of the world that we’re bringing about ourselves.
Putting the blame on other forces. Being let down by people. The things
we grab at in times of panic. It’s just mulling over the way of the
human.
Last time we wrote about L.A.-based Babes, they were really turned on.
Apparently, the five-piece is still revved up because their new video,
directed by Sarah Hamblin, features a handful of men (possibly the band
members) dancing suggestively in slow-motion, wearing speedos and
assless chaps. The men appear to be auditioning for something in front
of unamused singer Sarah Rayne Leigh, whose inner monologue corresponds
with the song’s melancholy “life is pointless” lyrical theme. The only
glimmer of interest Leigh shows is when one speedoed man shows up and
covers himself in gold glitter, but promptly pisses her off by throwing
silver glitter in her face. Leigh then lunges at him, still in slow
motion, and rips off his mustache. End scene. Under this ruckus lies the
band’s oozingly slow synth and Leigh’s timeless voice. Around 1:45, the
video also features a short cameo from Leigh’s ex-boyfriend Harris
Wittels, the late comedian, actor, and writer, best known for his work
on Parks And Recreation.
I have seen a lot of things in music videos, but I have never seen
anything remotely like the pissing scene here. That’s a new one. I am
disgusted, and I am impressed.
Christchurch’s Salad Boys don’t sound enough like New Zealand’s
underground rock legends of yore to qualify as torchbearers, exactly —
their power-pop aesthetic is more streamlined than the ragtag post-punk
jangle of the Clean and the Bats — but in terms of quality, these guys
are right up there with those Flying Nun legends. “Dream Date”
is our first evidence, a sparkling blast of instantly likable rock ‘n’
roll that gives me happy flashbacks to the Only Ones’ “Another Girl,
Another Planet.” The song, from Salad Boys’ forthcoming debut album Metalmania,
now has an official video by Ben Dodd and singer-guitarist Joe Sampson.
It’s proof you can make a low-budget, low-stakes video that doesn’t
suck (other DIY bands take note!). Sampson explains the clip’s genesis
in a press release:
The only idea we had to begin with was that I was going
to run as fast as I could up a hill to the point of collapse and that
was going to the be the video. We ventured around Banks Peninsula in my
car and stopped and filmed where it seemed appropriate, plus some
filming of me driving. James and Ben were both out of town at the time
so it obviously couldn’t be a band shoot thing, so we decided to go down
the cut price DIY route instead, which I think we nailed real
horrorshow. The only vaguely inspired part was trying to make some of
the scenes look like a shitty New Zealand TV drama – the scenes with the
Tomahawk in the forest and my face in the rear view mirror. Also, I was
attempting to imitate Taylor Swift, namely in the ‘Shake It Off’ video.
Not someone I identify with but who’s facial expressions I admire.
Next month, Against Me! will release a live album called 23 Live Sex Acts,
which is a great name for a live album, and also an apt way to describe
the intensity and intimacy of an Against Me! concert. Today, they’ve
shared a live version of their Transgender Dysphoria Blues
track “True Trans Soul Rebel,” and it’s a testament to Laura Jane Grace
and the rest’s talent that it’s almost indistinguishable from the studio
version while still managing to carry an extra punch. The track is
accompanied by a fuzzy black-and-white lyric video.
Apparently, the existence of a new Dr. Dre album couldn’t be the only big rap news to come out last night. Instead, Mac Miller used a busy news night to announce the forthcoming release of his own new album GO:OD AM,
which is coming next month. And by way of announcing it, he shared a
video for the brand-new first single “100 Grandkids,” a breezy and
welcoming lope that does a nice job accommodating Miller’s darting,
loopy flow and interpolating Diddy’s “Bad Boys For Life.” The video
drops Miller into a middle-school play and then onto a deserted parking
lot with a lonely lowrider.
Today is the official release date for Melbourne quartet Deaf Wish’s debut LP, Pain, on Sub Pop Records. To accompany their big day, the band has shared a video for their song “On” via Brooklyn Vegan.
Not only do the lyrics depict champagne and rainbows, but the video,
directed by Vincenzi Vandella, does as well. “On” is one of the album’s
mellower songs, but it rocks just as hard as any.
Today, Seattle garage rockers La Luz release their Ty Segall-produced album Weirdo Shrine. We’ve posted their songs “You Disappear” and “Don’t Wanna Be Anywhere,” and now they’ve made a truly strange animated video for the sort-of title track “Black Hole, Weirdo Shrine.” Director Meghan Tryon
tells a truly incomprehensible story involving a naked cowgirl,
anthropomorphic animals, and melting faces. Chances are you haven’t seen
something this strange set in the old west since Jodorowsky’s El Topo.
