A few times now, the French dance producer Pilooski has teamed up
with occasional Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker; he remixed Cocker’s 2009
song “You’re In My Eyes (Discosong)” and helped out with his art show
earlier this year. Now Cocker has shown up on Pilooski’s new track
“Completely Sun,” doing a dazed and inscrutable spoken-word bit over
chiming, minimal production. And as Pitchfork points out, director Dodi El Sherbini
has filmed a “Completely Sun” video that features Cocker visiting a zoo
and looking vaguely disturbed and terrified by everything he sees. The
video quality is grainy and surveillance-camera-esque, and Cocker looks
like a humanoid alien from an extremely low-budget ’80s sci-fi movie.
Last year, Dave Navarro participated in a PSA to combat domestic
violence. Following his appearance, the former Jane’s Addiction and Red
Hot Chili Peppers guitarist opened up
about the death of his mother, Connie. In 1983, when Navarro was 15
years old, his aunt and mother were murdered by her ex-boyfriend, John
Riccardi, who wasn’t caught and convicted until 1991. Navarro attributes
a good deal of his emotional distress and drug abuse to this traumatic
life event, which he speaks about at length in the trailer for the
documentary he co-produced about the murders. Mourning Son was directed by Todd Newman and is due out in December. Watch a trailer for the film.
Jeff Rosenstock is a prolific songwriter best known for his work in
the Brooklyn-based collective Bomb The Music Industy! and more recently,
as half of Antarctigo Vespucci, a band that he started alongside Chris
Farren that made our list of the 50 Best New Bands of 2015. Rosenstock’s solo album We Cool? came out earlier this year, and today he’s debuted a new video for one of its songs on Noisey. The clip for “Hall Of Fame” is a puppet-filled, whimsical take on public access television. Philip Stone directs.
Throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Electric Light Orchestra became
international superstars by bringing classical flourishes and theatrical
orchestration into the context of saccharine, whimsical pop-rock. Jeff
Lynne helmed the band till its initial disbandment in 1986, and in
recent years has reformed and renamed the project as Jeff Lynne’s ELO. A
new album titled Alone in The Universe is his first studio release after 14 years and lead singles “When The Night Comes” and “When I Was A Boy”
show ELO in newly polished light, sounding just as they did in their
heyday, but fresher. The latter just arrived with a video, and it’s a
surefire tearjerker. Comprising one long, slow-motion, panoramic shot,
the video follows a young Lynne’s dream of rock & roll stardom.
Taylor Swift’s 1989 turns one year old today, and what a year it’s been! Notably, 1989 is one of only five albums to spend its entire first year in the Billboard 200 top 10. Billboard informs us that the other four are Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A., Celine Dion’s Falling Into You, and Adele’s 21.
Swift has a long way to go to match Springsteen’s 84(!) consecutive
weeks in the top 10, but given her staying power so far it doesn’t seem
out of the question.
Anyway, to celebrate the album’s one-year anniversary, Swift shared a solo piano version of standout “Out Of The Woods,”
recorded at the GRAMMY Museum’s Clive Davis Theater during their recent
exhibition The Taylor Swift Experience. Are you experienced? Have you
ever been experienced? If you can just get your mind together, then come
on across to her.
MØ debuted her latest Diplo collaboration, “Kamikaze,”
earlier this month, and today she’s shared a video for the track. Karen
Marie Ørsted’s visuals have always been particularly well-attuned — see
the great ones for “Walk This Way,” “Don’t Wanna Dance,” and “XXX 88”
— and this one’s no different: It was shot in Kiev by directing duo
Truman & Cooper, and features a lot of dancing (and some fighting)
in a dirt lot, eye-catching fashion choices, and a raucous adventure out
into the city. As always, MØ gives a badass performance.
“‘Kamikaze’ is a happy party song, but at the same time also about
being lost and restless,” MØ said in a press release. “What I really
like about this video is that it embraces both those aspects: the party
vibe — the friendships and the happiness — but also the darkness, the
craziness, and the doom. And it’s not just the song that has that
duality, it’s very much who I am.”
The women of the world have given us an astonishing number of
fantastic folk-rock records this year, and This Is The Kit’s pensive yet
muscular Bashed Out
is near the head of the class. It’s one of the best albums of 2015 not
to benefit from a media hype sensation, but maybe listen and love it
anyway? Be an individual by doing exactly what I say! Your latest
gateway into the album is this video for “Magic Spell,”
although these visuals — directed, created, and hand-drawn by Sam
Wisternoff — accompany a non-album version of the track, slightly more
raw and rocking than the briskly ethereal original.
Jimmy LaValle just released a new video for his song “New Soul,” the
first we’ve heard from LaValle’s project the Album Leaf since 2010’s A Chorus Of Storytellers. The follow-up to that record, Between Waves,
is slated to be released in 2016. In the clip accompanying “New Soul,” a
woman traipses through a barren desert landscape carrying a dead
rabbit. Director Michael Raines told NPR about the video’s central concept:
We never had a conversation about the song’s meaning or
intentions… I wanted to make something that felt expansive, like the
song itself, but ultimately let the viewer decide who this woman was and
whether it was a story about death, rebirth, or both.
The video for Adele’s new single “Hello,” in which she tearfully looks back on a failed relationship with a guy played by The Wire’s
Tristan Wilds, opens with the singer talking on a flip phone. “When I
heard the song I saw a story right away,” director Xavier Dolan told The Los Angeles Times
in a new interview. “Just this idea of taking the phone and calling
your past.” But does that phone have to be a flip phone? Can the past
only communicate with mid-2000s era technology? (Makes sense.) This is
what Dolan has to say about that, and about everyone’s preoccupation
with Adele’s choice of cell phone:
It drives me crazy. I could see the GIFs on Twitter. I’m
like, ‘Guys, get over it. It doesn’t matter.’ But the real explanation
is that I never like filming modern phones or cars. They’re so implanted
in our lives that when you see them in movies you’re reminded you’re in
reality. If you see an iPhone or a Toyota in a movie, they’re
anti-narrative, they take you out of the story. If I put an iPhone or a
modern car in a movie it feels like I’m making a commercial.
Ok, there you have it. Xavier Dolan would love it if you could all just stop talking about Adele’s flip phone now please!
The path leading up to Grimes’ fourth album, Art Angels, has been a bit of a winding one. Last summer, she followed up her 2012 breakthrough Visions with “Go,” a polarizing EDM-pop banger with a legit drop
that she’d originally written for Rihanna, and many fans were not so
happy about it. Then, she announced that she was scrapping the version
of the album she’d been working on — because “it sucked” and “was depressing,” emphatically not
because of the negative reaction to “Go” — and everything she said
about it after that seemed to indicate that it could either be
absolutely brilliant or a total mess. It’s all “real instruments!” Half of the tracks are diss tracks! There’s a nu-metal track with a Taiwanese rapper! The whole thing was inspired by Billy Joel! There’s a song about a gender-fluid vampire Al Pacino! That cover art!
Now, after all that, we’re finally hearing the first piece of actual
recorded music — actually two songs, “Flesh Without Blood” and “Life In
The Vivid Dream.” And let me get this out of the way right now: “Flesh
Without Blood” is a straight-up pop song, with a bratty electric guitar
riff and a chorus that’ll lodge itself into your brain. It’s good! Even
beyond “Go” and her songs with Jack Antonoff, Grimes has never been shy about her love for mainstream pop music — remember when she ruffled all those cool kid feathers by playing Taylor Swift and Mariah Carey at a Boiler Room set? — and underneath all of the loops and layers and weirdness, Visions
was a record full of pop songs. She’s good at writing pop songs! But
she’s still Grimes, so even when she’s making “conventional” pop music,
her voice is slathered in reverb and echoing all over itself, and there
are all these weird little touches around the edges of the production,
like the song’s plasticky surface got a bit melted and warped.
The track debuted as BBC Radio 1’s Hottest Record, and Grimes hopped
on the phone for an interview. She revealed that the album will be out
next Friday (11/6). There are two songs with featured vocalists: One
with Janelle Monae (!) that was recorded at Wondaland Studios, and
another previously discussed one with Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes.
And while the songs here may be more conventional, the video is kind
of bonkers. Grimes directed and edited the whole thing herself, and she
trots out all of the alter egos
she’s been talking about in interviews. One’s a bloodythirsty angel,
one’s a cyberpunk gamer, one’s a purple-wigged Victorian lady, etc., and
they all have names like “Roccoco Basilisk” and “Screechy Bat.” Grimes
plays all of them herself, wearing various outlandish costumes, and they
all look kind of like anime characters, and angel Grimes is maybe
trying to murder Victorian Grimes using a voodoo doll? It’s all fairly
over-the-top and ridiculous, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m into it or
not, but you should probably just watch and check out the tracklist
below.
The Greek ambient dream-pop project Keep Shelly In Athens is shrouded
in enigma, and their latest video is just as alluring and enchanting.
We’ve already heard “Benighted” over the summer, and now we’re seeing a video for their new record’s title track, “Now I’m Ready.”
The clip maximizes the song’s haunting quality, a darkly chilling
narrative going hand-in-hand with the whole eerie-yet-mesmerizing nature
of Keep Shelly In Athens’ sound.
British shoegaze has been experiencing a heavy resurgence in recent months thanks to acts like Nai Harvest and Inheaven,
and Swindon four-piece Rain are the latest new band helping the genre
return to its glory days. Their debut track “Slur” is chaotic yet
quietly controlled grunge-pop that sits amongst the cracks of everything
between ’90s shoegaze, scuzzy post-punk, and DIY noise rock. It’s taken
from the band’s forthcoming debut EP, Symphony Pains, and the
accompanying video is a haze that matches the song’s distorted guitars.
Oh, and major props to the guitarist for wearing a Nai Harvest T-shirt.
Watch below via DIY.
The Philadelphia-via-Los Angeles DIY friend-core duo Girlpool released Before The World Was Big,
their excellent debut album, earlier this year, and they’ve already got
new music in the works. Lately, they’ve been playing a new song called
“Soup” at live shows, and PressureDrop.TV
filmed some professional footage of them performing it at the Bunker in
San Francisco earlier this week. It’s slower and more hypnotic than
most of the duo’s older songs, but it still has plenty of their intense
energy. Girlpool are one of the greatest punk rock bands in the world
right now, and they’ve gotten to that point with no drummer; the video
below might give some idea how they’ve managed to get there.
U2 already made two videos for “Song For Someone,” a track from their dumpster-fire 2014 album Songs Of Innocence. The first one starred Woody Harrelson, and it was a really affecting little vignette. Another one
had the band in it, and it was broody and black-and-white and
forgettable. But they’ve now made a third video for the same song, and
it’s a different thing entirely. This time around, they’ve teamed up
with Chris Milk, the former music video director who, more recently, created the virtual-reality app Vrse. According to VRScout,
this is a full-on virtual reality video — as in, you have to watch it
with one of those things that turns your phone into a headset. When it
starts out, you’re onstage with the band as they perform the song, and
as the video continues, you’re home with different fans as they sing
along. U2 gave fans a preview in London before a recent show; a
traveling bus allowed people to try it out on Oculus Rift headsets. But
you can now apparently try it for yourself if you download the Vrse app.
Conner Youngblood’s music is incredibly minimalistic, just like his
new music video for “The Badlands.” The video, directed by Johannes
Greve Muskat and produced by Youngblood, takes the viewer on a slow,
picturesque journey through South Dakota’s Badlands. Youngblood cruises
down an empty street on his skateboard, the clay-rich Badlands towering
in the background. Extra special bonus: Youngblood’s German shepherd,
Juneau, makes a guest appearance. I can’t decide which is more
beautiful, the sweeping song or the slow-motion imagery. Watch the video
via Nowness.
Just two days ago, Adele announced that the follow-up to her 2011
mega-blockbuster would be coming out soon. The new album is called 25,
and it’s set to arrive next month. And this morning, we finally get to
hear “Hello,” the album’s first single and Adele’s first new one since
2012’s “Skyfall.”
It’s a grand, sweeping soul song, and it comes with a stately
black-and-white video from director Xavier Dolan. Adele stars alongside
Tristan Wilds, the actor who played Michael on seasons four and five of The Wire. On first listen, the song sounds pretty great. Check it out below. Also below, check out the tracklist for 25 and what Adele has to say about writing a song with Tobias Jesso Jr.
Héloïse Letissier is a singer-songwriter who records as Christine And
The Queens and who’s reportedly beloved in her homeland. Last week, she
released a self-titled Christine And The Queens album, and on the
single “Jonathan,” she teams up with the dependably devastating Perfume Genius. As DIY reports,
the two of them appear together in a new video for the song,
modern-dancing under an undulating row of light tubes. It’s an absorbing
vision for the song, and Letissier directed it herself.
Matt Berninger of the National and Brent Knopf of Menomena and Ramona
Falls have been friends since before their respective bands found
success. Years later, the two are collaborating in EL VY and putting out
their debut, Return To The Moon, this Friday. The video for “Need A Friend” is the fourth in aseriesof lyric/music videos
created by Berninger’s brother Tom. This one features Matt exploring
his childhood home of Cincinnati via bicycle, plus footage of the band
playing live with Andy Stack of Wye Oak on drums and Matt Sheehy of Lost
Lander on bass. Turns out Matt Berninger is very needy.
Who knew laid-back lo-fi would be such a fitting horror movie
soundtrack? In John Andrews of Quilt’s new music video for “Peace Of
Mind,” pulled from his recent solo record Bit By The Fang,
Andrews is seen chased around a picturesque forest by a mysterious and
terrifying axe murderer dressed in a rather frightening wolf-hybrid
costume. Andrews cowers and frolics and runs to the sounds of his own
slacker guitars and dreamy psych-folk, his peaceful guitar-playing
rudely interrupted by the masked creature. The music video blends the
lines of a cartoonish reality, and (spoiler alert!) Andrews’ own
bandmates even attend his funeral at the end of movie.
Glasgow native and Manchester export Gary McClure’s new project American Wrestlers are one of our recent Band To Watch graduates, and they recently cracked our list of the 50 best new bands of 2015.
Director Evan Cutler Wattles’ new music video for “The Rest Of You” is a
perfect foray into the band’s patchwork ’90s lo-fi. The video oversees a
zombie apocalypse epidemic, but without the zombies. Instead, the
humans of metropolitan Chicago become blurry, faceless drones thanks to
the inevitable influence of the static age. It’s hard to miss the social
commentary watching the civilians becoming large blurs as the blankness
ultimately takes over the entire city like a virus. “The Rest Of You”
is taken from American Wrestlers’ self-titled debut, released in March.
Jack Ü, the superstar-DJ team of Diplo and Skrillex, had one of the
summer’s biggest and best hits with their Justin Bieber collab “Where Are Ü Now.” That was the best song on their early-2015 surprise album Skrillex And Diplo Present Jack Ü, but another highlight was “To Ü,” their collab with AlunaGeorge singer Aluna Francis, and that one has a video now. Director AG Rojas filmed a series of real-life couples around Detroit, giving the whole
thing a sticky and voyeuristic Larry Clark feel. Also, there are
explosions. And Jack Ü have also released a new EP of “To Ü” remixes,
including contributions from Armand Van Helden, Clean Bandit, Oliver,
and AlunaGeorge’s George Reid.
One year ago today, Killer Mike and El-P released the best album of 2014, and to celebrate RTJ2’s
anniversary, the duo have just released a new video for “Angel Duster.”
Directed and edited by Ryosuke Tanzawa, the clip is a pretty simple
one, made up entirely of footage of Run The Jewels performing at
Pitchfork Festival, Life Is Beautiful, Bonnaroo, Rock en Seine, BBC, Red
Bull, and Music Midtown, but it’s a testament to the absolutely killer
live show these guys have perfected and to the banner year they’ve had.
By the time RTJ3 comes out, they’ll probably rule the world (and/or punch its goddamn teeth out).
I can’t remember the last time a tracklist announcement had me more
excited than the one for Ty Dolla $ign’s forthcoming official debut LP Free TC.
This album will, of course, come with plenty of appearances from Ty$’s
present-day rap and R&B peers, and we’ve already posted songs like “When I See Ya,” with Fetty Wap, and “Blasé,”
with Future and Rae Sremmurd. But the album will also feature a whole
lot of ’90s R&B stars: Brandy! Jagged Edge! Obvious enormous
influence R. Kelly! And then there’s “Solid,” which pairs Ty$ up with
Babyface, maybe his single most unlikely collaborator. In the ’90s, on
his own and as a behind-the-scenes type, Babyface really defined the
sound of silky, sweeping mainstream R&B. He’s still working today —
he and Toni Braxton released the shockingly great grown-folks
relationship album Love, Marriage & Divorce last year — but
the present-day sound of R&B is pretty far removed from what
Babyface was doing. So it’s weirdly awesome to see him and Ty$ sitting
on a beach, both strumming acoustic guitars, in the video for their new
collab “Solid.” Even better: The song is incredible. Babyface doesn’t
appear to sing on it, but his touch is all over it, from the wispy and
minimally buttery early moments to the transcendent point where the
strings come in. It’s all just so good that I’m almost mad. Watch
director Jerome D’s video.
Neon Indian – “Slumlord Rising” (Dir. Alan Palomo & Tim Nackashi)
The movie that this video most clearly reflects is Liquid Sky,
the absolutely nonsensical ’80s punk sci-fi B-movie that helped birth
the electroclash aesthetic and that remains virtually unwatchable to
this day. But there’s a certain strain of grimy, seedy low-budget ’80s
horror/sci-fi movies that I really, really love — The Hidden, The Wraith, Near Dark — and this video does an awesome job reflecting the sensibilities of those movies. Extra points for making no sense at all.
New Jersey bedroom producer and Ryan Hemsworth pal Dan Casey put out his debut EP as dd elle, the unassumingly titled u, last month. It’s a release that could easily slide under the radar — everything about it feels self-consciously small,
from its title to its runtime to Casey’s shy, pitch-shifted vocals —
but it’s one that’s absolutely worthy of your time. Today, he’s just
shared a new video for EP track “a note,” actually one of the first dd
elle songs to be released all the way back in early 2014. Directed by
Cameron Reed, the clip is composed entirely of the results of a stock
footage search for “people smiling,” save for one brief shot of an
unsmiling Casey at the end. The track itself sounds like a dazed
sunbeam, and Casey’s meek and occasionally unintelligible vocals don’t
draw much attention to his actual words, but the scrolling
singalong-style text in the video highlights the dissonance between the
daydreamy sonics and the seriously fucked up, suicidal lyrics: “I feel
like jumping in front of something/ I feel like being destroyed/ I feel
like taking my final sigh/ I feel like leaving a note.” Combined with
the images of happy, smiling faces, the end result is something stuck in
an odd space between deeply comforting and deeply disturbing, or maybe
both at once.
“Run2Me” is a single off of the Smashing Pumpkins’ most recent album Monuments To An Elegy,
which was released almost a year ago. The band just debuted a
hyper-stylized video for the song, directed by Billy Corgan’s longtime
collaborator Linda Strawberry. She told Vulture
that “Run2Me” reminded her of the tarot card “The Magician,” and she
based her visual interpretation of the song on that comparison:
The Magician is symbolic of transition and inspiration,
while the protagonist in the video is afraid of who she is about to
become, she learns, accepts and then lets go of whatever was holding her
back.
Today, the internet is all a-buzz about the innovation we expected from the future predicted in the Back To The Future
movies — where are our hover boards, our self-lacing shoes? — which
makes it an appropriate time for YACHT to release a video for “I Thought
The Future Would Be Cooler,” the title track from their latest album.
In the band’s always clever but never very subtle way, the video serves
as a commentary on our thirst for progress and our constant
disappointment with what we have. It pokes fun at pretty much every
notable modern technology or trend — drones, vaping, streaming, smart
watches, those dumb video conferencing Segways — all while Jona Bechtolt
and Claire L. Evans play it up for the camera.
“This is a science fiction video that uses only existing technologies,” Bechtolt told NPR.
“VR, drones, self-balancing scooters (“hoverboards”), telepresence
robots, selfie sticks, Soylent and vape pens. All of these things have
variably been presented as symbols of our futuristic world, but
individually, up close, they just feel straight-up comical.” The video
was directed by Eugene Kotlyarenko.
Jenny Lee Lindberg is best known as the bassist in Warpaint, but back in September she announced her forthcoming debut solo album under the name jennylee. right on!
is due out in December, and “Never” is its first trance-inducing
single. The way Lindberg delivers the same word over and over again
reminds me of Kim Gordon’s impassioned, semi-sinister command (“kiss
me!”) on Sonic Youth’s “Shadow Of A Doubt.” Watch a video for “Never” directed by jennylee and Mia Kirby.
Philadelphia five-piece the Spirit Of The Beehive released a great and overlooked EP, You Are Arrived (But You’ve Been Cheated), last month, and they’ve just announced that they have signed to Jade Tree Records
to put out their next full-length, which they’ll go into the studio to
record early next year. They’ve also shared a video for the heavy,
psych-influenced title track of their latest EP, featuring distorted,
laggy shots of people experiencing… pleasant alone time. If you haven’t
checked out this band yet, please do. It’s totally worth it — watch via BrooklynVegan below.
Spanish garage-rockers Hinds will release their new LP, Leave Me Alone, early next year, and we’ve already heard a few of its singles. “Garden”
is an acerbic slow-burner, and today the band debuted a new video for
the song inspired by the French New Wave. Director Pedro Martin-Calero
told i-D the following about the piece:
I love [Godard’s] expressive use of color, the films’
surreal mood and their subtle sense of humor. They still look new and
fresh 50 years later and still give me a sense of freedom… To my mind,
all of these elements fit the song and aesthetic world of the band.
The Virginia-based rapper D.R.A.M. (of “Cha Cha” fame) released his single “$”
back in August, which features Donnie Trumpet. It’s a wide,
open-hearted song, and the new accompanying video lends it even more
sentimentality. Nathan R. Smith directs as we witness a slice of
D.R.A.M.’s life; watch below via Complex.
We don’t yet know what’s going on with Moby and his mysterious new
project Moby & The Void Pacific Choir. Last month, he sent out the
tense, cryptic video for a new track called “The Light Is Clear In My Eyes.”
And now he’s done it again. His publicists haven’t really included any
information in the press email for new jam “Almost Loved.” Instead, all
they’ve given us is this quote: “Normally when people refer to a void,
it’s a big, dark, scary, thing – the dark, malicious, Nietzschean void,
where if you stare too long into the it, it stares back into you. But we
like the paradox of a pacific, peaceful void – a benign emptiness.” The
song itself is a driving synth-rocker with a bit of postpunk chilliness
and a howling choir of singers, while the vide is staticy and ominous.
Florence + The Machine’s new video for “Delilah,” the fiery single from the sweeping new album How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful, comes with a subtitle: “The Odyssey – Chapter 6.” That would seem to imply that this video, and the fivethatcamebeforeit,
make up some sort of epic Greek tale. If that’s the case, I don’t
really see it; these videos don’t seem to have all that much to do with
each other. This latest one is especially confounding. It takes place in
dingy offices and hotels rooms in what looks like Florida, and yet it’s
filled with fantastical images: Goblins, Biblical allusions, freakily
menacing orgy scenes. Through it all, we see Florence Welch doing the
convulsive dancing that she’s made something of a trademark. I have no
idea what it all means, but it’s memorable, intense filmmaking. Vincent Haycock once again directs. Check it out below.
The Weeknd’s chart-dominating “The Hills” already has a video, and now the song’s remix with a verse from Eminem
also has a video, except this one is an interactive “virtual reality
experience.” Directed by the great Nabil, the 360-degree spherical clip
was shot with a GoPro on the set of the singer’s recent Apple Music commercial,
and you can move the camera around to explore the scene as Abel Tesfaye
walks past an exploding car. Check it out below — the virtual reality
elements will only work on Google Chrome or the YouTube mobile app.
Next week, Maynard James Keenan’s non-Tool band Puscifer are releasing Money Shot, their first album in four years. At the end of their “Grand Canyon” video, we saw the two lucha libre-masked characters from last year’s “Toma” video aiming slingshots at the camera, and in the new video for the album’s title track,
they put them to good use. Directed by Tim Cadiente and Puscifer, the
clip follows a deal gone sour between the luchadores and two gangsters
played by Clifton Collins Jr. and Jacob Vargas. (There’s a glowing Pulp
Fiction-style suitcase involved.) Meanwhile, Maynard James Keenan hangs
out in a wrestling wring. Watch below via Rolling Stone.
Jay Rock finally released his sophomore album 90059 last month. The video for the Black Hippy posse cut “Vice City”
contained a bunch of scantily-clad women shaking their asses, and
there’s quite a bit more of that in the new video for “The Ways,” which
features Inglewood singer Sir. Jay Rock has a wild night in a strip
club, culminating in an impressionistic haze of butts and hooking up
with a stripper in the bathroom. Christian Sutton directs; watch below
via Pitchfork.
Reunited art-metal greats Faith No More sounded as dangerous and unstable as ever on Sol Invictus,
their ravenous new reunion album. So apparently, it isn’t too hard to
imagine that they’ll be able maintain that intensity into old age.
That’s what they do in the new video for the Sol Invictus track
“Sunny Side Up.” In the clip, director Joe Lynch imagines FNM as senior
citizens playing a show for all the heads in their retirement home,
while an understanding nurse doses everyone’s meds and gets them to all
trip out together. The actors playing the Faith No More members all seem
exactly right for their parts.
Wet’s latest in a series of pitch-perfect singles, “Weak,”
was released last month, and now it has a video to along with it, which
is as soft and considered as the song itself. There’s not much too it —
Kelly Zutrau takes the stage in an empty auditorium, performing
interpretive dance moves as the track builds — but it’s oddly
captivating, a bit like the band itself in that regard.
What is it about rock musicians imagining themselves as old men
today? First, it was Faith No More, played by senior-citizen actors and
seen rocking a nursing home in their “Sunny Side Up”
video. And now the members of the Real Estate side project Alex Bleeker
& The Freaks have dyed their hair grey and slapped on aging makeup.
In director Richard Law’s clip for “The Rest,” a laid-back and sun-baked amble from the album Country Agenda,
Bleeker and his band appear as older gentlemen who come back together
for long enough to play together in an empty theater.
Gwen Stefani debuted “Used To Love You” just this past Saturday
at a show in New York City, and she’s already put out the studio
version of the track. The song, which sounds like it stemmed from her recent divorce
from Gavin Rossdale, is part of a new collection of music that was
written after she scrapped an entire album that was set to come out last
year. In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Stefani reveals that the recording sessions that resulted in last year’s singles “Baby Don’t Lie” and “Spark The Fire”
and were intended to serve as the launching pad for her third solo
album — written in part with Benny Blanco — were trashed, and Stefani
got back to the drawing board:
It didn’t feel right. I didn’t feel fulfilled. That
record with Benny was done that way because I had just given birth and
had just started on The Voice and felt like I should do
something in music, but what was I going to do? There wasn’t enough
time. So I tried to make a record where I was just kind of involved —
which is how a lot of people do it, but it didn’t work for me.
Although it seemed like a tossed-off curio at first, “Hotline Bling”
has become one of Drake’s biggest hits ever. Currently holding steady at
#2, it matches “Best I Ever Had” as his highest-charting solo single.
And now it has a video by Director X featuring Drake doing corny but
endearing dance moves against various color palettes, sometimes
accompanied by voluptuous call center employees. Like the song itself,
this one is pretty simple but also pretty memorable.
Halloween-themed music videos are some of the best music videos, and
the new one from Richmond, Virginia doom-metallers Windhand is a good
one. The clip for the crushing, slow-rolling “Two Urns”
takes place on Halloween in 1987, and it shows what happens when some
goth teenagers come into contact with some ill-intentioned creatures of
the night. The narrative is a little hard to follow, but the sense of
ominous atmosphere is real. John Nunn and Mikael Simpson direct.
South African pop-R&B artist Petite Noir has just shared a really
cool video for “La Vie Est Belle / Life Is Beautiful,” the title track
from his very good debut album.
The clip was directed by Alan Del Rio Ortiz, and features Yannick
Ilunga standing in front of some vividly-imagined patterned backdrops,
sometimes blending in and other times sticking out like a sore thumb.
This morning, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles made his second appearance on Marc Maron’s WTF
podcast. And he also shared his self-directed video for “No Future Part
IV: No Future Triumphant,” one of the many, many bracing and excellent
songs on the new Titus Andronicus rock opera The Most Lamentable Tragedy.
The video is an energetic DIY affair, with Stickles raging out in front
of a Biggie Smalls mural, on the roof of a tour van, and onstage at his
Shea Stadium homebase. He also smokes a whole lot of weed, shows off
his band’s merch at every opportunity, and hangs out with a masked
hypeman, which raises the question: Why don’t more rock videos feature
hypemen? The intro seems to sample an old Das Racist live bit. This
video is a whole lot of fun, and it goes a long way toward showing what a
fired-up and magnetic frontman Stickles is.
Neon Indian’s third album, VEGA INTL. Night School, came out last week, and today Alan Palomo has shared a short film called Slumlord Rising.
The 8-minute clip was co-directed by Palomo and Tim Nackashi, and is
centered around a seedy LA nightclub, evoking the vibes of the entire
album. It comes attached with an oral history over on Yours Truly that delves into how his new album was made.
Usher addresses police brutality on his new Nas-featuring song,
“Chains.” The track is accompanied by an interactive video hosted on TIDAL’s website
that displays photos of unarmed murder victims, most of whom were
killed by the police. The video asks for access to your computer camera
before it begins, and stops every time you avert your eyes from the
screen. “To listen to Usher’s song ‘Chains,’ look in the eyes of unarmed
victims,” the introduction reads. The video and track are available here.
In their live shows for the past few months, UK synthpop heroes Hot Chip have been covering
“Dancing In The Dark,” Bruce Springsteen’s synthpoppiest hit and one of
his biggest. And later this week, they’ll release a studio version of
that cover, which blows the song out past the seven-minute mark and
concentrates more on the sugary melodies of the original than the grunty
intensity. (It also includes, out of nowhere, a big chunk of LCD
Soundsystem’s “All My Friends.”) The cover leads off the group’s new Dancing In The Dark EP, which also features three remixes, including Soulwax’s take on “Huarache Lights.” Director Kieran Evans
has put together a video for Hot Chip’s cover, which mixes footage of
the band performing live with TV Carnage-style footage of old,
cheesed-out ’80s public access television.
Miguel’s whole recent album Wildheart
is full of hazy, sexed-up tracks that blur identifiable genre lines,
and “Waves,” with its busy cowbells and gurgling guitars, is one of the
better examples. It’s a psychedelic R&B song about fucking, and it
undulates beautifully. In Miguel’s new video for the song, he plays and
gets drunk at a dark party that’s absolutely full of beautiful and
fashionable people who don’t mind getting mostly undressed. This seems
like the sort of party that Miguel would go to. J. Cole and Wale are
both there, too. Maybe Miguel was nice enough to sneak them in the back.
The entire rest of the crowd seems to be made up of models. Noisey premiered the video this morning;
Why is tripped-out, gory claymation still so goddam watchable? Once
upon a time, this kind of thing was probably subversive. It’s not
anymore, but it’s still a whole lot of fun to stare at.
A few days ago Chairlift shared their first new material since that epic Beyonce collaboration “No Angel” in 2013, and “Ch-Ching”
definitely sounds like working with the R&B superstar rubbed off on
Caroline Polachek and Patrick Wimberly. The song is full of their
signature wobbly pop genius, but also jam-packed with brass flourishes
and whole swathes of breathy harmonies that pay homage to Beyoncé’s
signature style. Taking the influence a bit further, Caroline Polachek
is decked out in this incredible mod take on a construction worker
costume and dancing around industrial parts of New York in the new video
for the clip. The video was directed and filmed by that-go — with creative direction from Chairlift — and doubles down on the same
limitless joy and exuberance that the song contains.
Brooklyn dream-pop act Small Black’s new album, Best Blues,
will be out tomorrow, and in advance of that, they’ve shared a watery,
introspective video for a track off the record called “No One Wants It
To Happen To You.” The clip was co-directed by Small Black and William Colby.
Math rock spazz trio Battles put out their third cheekily-titled instrumental album La Di Da Di earlier this year, and today they’ve shared the Ben Jones-directed video for “Dot Net.” As Pitchfork reports,
the video is an initial release in Warp’s Arts film series for Channel
4. It depicts a woman in a museum calmly watching kaleidoscopic,
psychedelic patterns swirl in and out of focus. It also involved an
Apple Watch.
Here’s what Jones had to say about the video:
The exploration of the digital territory between abstract
graphic user interfaces, polyrhythms and human interaction was a
paramount inspiration of this video. Prodding and proving the causality
of passive engagement vs hyper-addiction concerning the influence of
“screen time” (using the video and audio of an iPad or iPhone or etc….).
In the end we kept returning to this jump off: “Is this a dope music
vid to have on your Apple Watch? Yes or No?”
Arca’s latest Mutant single “EN” arrives with a video, but
it’s not by longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda. This time Arca handles
the visuals himself, but like his other videos, it still toys with
notions of androgyny and sexuality. Shot from below as if to look up the
subject’s skirt, the yellow-tinted clip features a figure in
high-heeled boots and other apparently female attire, but partway
through the character is revealed to be Arca himself. The music is
typically choppy and ethereal, at once calming and disturbing.
The loud-and-bleary New York rock band a Place To Bury Strangers released their Transfixation album near the beginning of the year, and they’ve been steadily cranking out videos for its songs: “Straight,” “We’ve Come So Far,” “Love High,” “Now It’s Over.”
Their new clip for “Supermaster” isn’t something you should watch if
you feel weird about snakes. Most of the video consists of extreme
close-up shots of snakes, and its message seems to be: Snakes look
fucking freaky. The clip also features someone injecting what appears to
be snake venom, which seems like a fantastically bad idea.
The new video for California indie-rock duo Best Coast’s track “In My
Eyes” sees the band performing live in Hollywood, lead singer Bethany
Cosentino lamenting about the breakdown of a failed relationship. It’s
hard too get down about a loser ex-lover, though, when you’re performing
atop the Capitol Records Tower, 50,000 feet up in the air with an
incredible bird’s-eye view of Los Angeles. The catchy track is peppered
with hazy guitars and Cosentino’s storming vocals: “I treated you badly,
we ended so sadly / wish I didn’t care.” “In My Eyes” is pulled from
the band’s recent California Nights.
Earlier this year, all four members of Franz Ferdinand got together
with Sparks, the ’70s pop-auteur duo, to form a new supergroup called
FFS and to release a self-titled album. One of their early singles was “Call Girl,” a slinky and playful new-wave dance tune, and it just got a video from director Sasha Rainbow.
The clip shows all six members of the group dancing and strutting
across an increasingly distorted and nightmarish digital landscape.
If you liked hearing DMX shout over that terrible faux-Indian EDM garbage,
well, you’ll love hearing DMX shout over that terrible faux-Indian EDM
garbage while watching some dudes skateboard around Dubai! The song’s
video is the Dubai segment of Brain Farm’s movie We Are Blood, directed by Ty Evans and touted on its official website as “skateboarding’s first-ever ultra high definition movie.” Sick!
One of my favorite things about Haleek Maul’s rapping is how he
manages to teeter on the edge of hysterical, like he’s grinning
maniacally while spitting his lines. “Dead Em” is the latest track from
the Barbadian rappers long-teased mixtape Prince Midas. Along
with the clip, Maul has shared the full tracklist for the tape and
announced that it’ll be out 11/9. We’ve already heard several of the
tracks, including “Feuer” which features icy Danish singer Kill J, and the Saul Williams-featuring “Money God.” For “Dead Em” he’s once again teamed with frequent collaborator Shy Guy on production for a song that incorporates some Yeezus-sounding
AutoTune and plenty of braggadocio. The stark black and white video is
infused with paranoia and claustrophobia, as Maul dances alone in a
basement.
Wand released their third album in just over a year, 1000 Days,
just last month, and today they’ve debuted a new video for the song
“Sleepy Dog.” The video is an inventive take on video game aesthetics,
integrating old-school pixelated effects with live-action footage. It
stars a very cute little black dog, so what more could you ask for?
Meghan Tryon and Garrett Davis direct.
I had very kind things to say about Deerhunter’s new Fading Frontier
yesterday, and one big reason I adore the album is “Living My Life,” a
song that sets Bradford Cox’s ruminations about wasted youth against
gorgeously shimmering ’80s pop that splits the difference between new
wave and new age. “Will you tell me when you find out how to conquer all
this fear?” Cox sings. “I’ve been spending all my time out on the
fading frontier.” As with the “Breaker” visuals,
Cox shot and edited the “Living My Life” video with an assist from
Lockett Pundt. It’s a collage-like piece that features Pundt, Cox’s dog
Faulkner, scenes from around Atlanta, and a lot of microscopic footage.
In a press release, Cox explains the ideas behind the video, which is
dedicated to Miles Davis:
…macro meditations on geology and botany to observations
of afternoon light filtered onto wooden floors. The idea was to have a
formless visual that does not conform to the overwhelming cleverness and
narrative ambition of most modern videos. Instead we have a sometimes
pointless, sometimes ridiculous, and sometimes hypnotically beautiful
mess of images and rhythm. The final section of the video, in
particular, could be a teenage garage band take on Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
Various chemicals and dyes were used to create a liquid fantasia for the
song’s transcendent climax.
The great music-video director Nabil has worked with the UK rock band Foals a number of times over the past few years, most recently on the GoPro-shilling “Mountain At My Gates” video. And now they’ve come together again, for the clip for the brooding “Give It All,” another song from the band’s recent What Went Down.
This one tells the story of a man dealing with the aftereffects of a
breakup, which is a much more basic storyline than the sort of thing
Nabil usually does. But this being Nabil, it’s all very compellingly
shot. Nabil has also posted his own director’s cut of the video, which
has a more intense ending and which, thanks to its few extra seconds, is
really more worth your time. Check out both the official version and
Nabil’s cut below.
Today, the Decemberists release their new EP Florasongs, a set of tracks that came from the same sessions that gave us their recent album What A Terrible World, What A Beautiful World. We’ve posted their song “Why Would I Now?,”
and now they’ve shared a video for the horn-laced EP track “Cavalry
Captain.” After the band spoofed ’70s talk shows with their “Make You Better”
video earlier this year, it was only a short leap over into the world
of sci-fi cult ’70s infomercials. Colin Meloy stars as the founder of
Decemberism, a flim-flam man getting rich off of other people’s
longings. The video has all the cheesy graphics and static of an old
infomercial accidentally captured on VHS tape.
Earlier this year, the Canadian duo Purity Ring gave us Another Eternity, their second album of rapturous, atmospheric synthpop. Their single “Begin Again”
has been on the internet since July, but it’s only now getting a video,
perhaps because every Purity Ring video makes more sense during the
Halloween season than during any other time of year. Pitchfork points out that Young Replicant
directed this one, and it tells the story of a dead body coming back to
life in a creepily solemn Puritan village. It’s a spooky, shadowy piece
of work, and you can watch it below.
Solo electronic artist Dan Friel wants you to know that kids can party better than we can. His new video for “Rattler,” a song from his latest LP, Life,
shows children frolicking in silver confetti and raging hard in slow
motion. Directed by Philip Leaman and Zoie Omega, it’s a pretty funny
and mesmerizing visual counterpart to the track’s breakneck, aggressive
electronics — like watching the ecstatic wonders of childhood, but set
to the sounds of a synthesizer thrown into a wood chipper.
London dream-poppers Novella released their debut album Land earlier this year, and their single “Sentences”
is a gooey mirage of murmuring guitars and fluttery vocals. The new
music video focuses on the band members’ faces, using lights and fans to
do glamorous things to them. It’s also full of those squishy little
sphere things that serve as reusable ice cubes.
Billie Marten is 16-year-old folk prodigy from England. I fell hard for her early enormous track “Heavy Weather” and have been following closely since. “Hope is a distance unreached,” she sings on newer, delicate track “Bird,”
and that’s probably the best summary of what hope actually feels like
that I’ve ever heard. Now she’s shared an absolutely stunning video to
accompany the song. It was shot in the Buttermere, Lake District in
England, directed by Franklyn Banks and produced by Tom King. It follows
Marten and a mystery protagonist through the gorgeous British
countryside and into some mythical behaviors.
Irish epic art-rockers Cloud Castle Lake are one of many bands from
across the Atlantic making their US performance debut at CMJ Music
Marathon this week. They’re also one of the best, a compositionally
ambitious lot with a knack for dynamic buildup and catharsis that rivals
key influences Sigur Rós and Radiohead. We quite liked last year’s Dandelion EP and this year’s “Glacier”
single, and today we’re excited to present the first song from their
upcoming debut full-length. “Genuflect” is a slow-burn sprawl that
evolves from creeping lurch to tribal tumble to free-jazz orchestral
chaos over the course of its seven minutes. As usual, it’s all topped
off by Daniel McAuley’s falsetto pirouetting on a high wire. Watch Cloud
Castle Lake perform it live below.
Last month, Chance The Rapper debuted a cover
of Kanye West’s “Family Business,” complete with new lyrics and the
distinctively Chance sentimental touch. Today, he’s shared a video for
the studio version of the cover featuring clips from his ongoing Family Matters tour (for which the track is named), behind-the-scene footage, and some home movies.
Toro Y Moi mastermind Chaz Bundick also records straight-up dance music under the name Les Sins. His outrageously catchy track “Bother” was the best thing about Michael,
the very good Les Sins album that Bundick released last year. And now,
motherfucking Puff Daddy has sampled it. Last night, Puff performed at
the BET Hip-Hop Awards and debuted a couple of new tracks. One of them,
“The Auction,” featured old collaborators Lil Kim and Styles P, as well
as rising Baltimore star King Los. The other was “Workin,” a song built
from a screwed-up sample of “Bother.” Puff performed a highly
choreographed version of it, and the track already feels like the
follow-up to “Finna Get Loose,”
the song Puff released after debuting it at the BET Awards earlier this
year. Below, listen to “Workin” and watch Puff debut it on the show
last night.
“Uneasy” is a song about crippling social anxiety, but Sheer present
it in a way that sounds far from fragile. Their ’90s-infected brand of
garage rock is confident and self-assured, regardless of the fact that
the chorus of this song rides on overwhelming feelings of ineptness.
This is the title track off of Sheer’s forthcoming debut, and the
accompanying Colin McCaffrey-directed clip shows the band putting all of
their anxieties on display; watch below via Noisey.
Megafaun’s Phil Cook recently went solo on the likably ramshackle new roots-music album Southland Mission, and now he’s made a video for his joyous cover of blues musician Charlie Parr’s “1922.” No Depressionposted
the Remedy-directed clip earlier this morning, and it follows Cook, in
crisp black-and-white, as he plays shows, practices, and hangs out with
friends. It’s like someone just took a high-quality camera and followed
Cook around for a couple of days, documenting every good hang he had.
And Cook seems to have a lot of good hangs. This is a deeply pleasant
music video, and you can watch.
Australian Britpop revivalists DMA’s have just shared a new video for “Lay Down,”
the lead single from their forthcoming debut album coming out next
year. It was directed by Tristan Jalleh, and features the trio (and a
bunch of replicas of themselves) engaging with a subtly disorienting
urban environment where there’s a lot of angles and ephemera that just
don’t fit right. There’s a lot of cool split screen work going on here
and, if you keep an eye out, a nice shoutout to The Craft as well.
Anna Von Hausswolff is a Swedish singer and organist who makes some dark, heavy gothic music, and her new album The Miraculous promises to be some of the darkest and heaviest and most gothic we’ve heard in recent memory. Her 11-minute monster “Come Wander With Me/Deliverance” should be enough evidence, but if it’s not, allow me to submit her new video for “Evocation,” also from Miraculous.
The song itself is full of drones and crashes, and the video, which Von
Hausswolff’s sister Maria Von Hausswolff directed, is heavy enough to
match. It starts as a long, slow zoom-in on a cold-looking forest
landscape, and it ends with a freaky meditation on Anna’s face.
Dangerous Minds debuted it today. If you’ve got epilepsy, don’t watch it. If you don’t, it’s below.
In the video for her lush and contemplative folk song “In The
Beginning,” Natalie Mering, the artist who records as Weyes Blood,
spends some quality alone time out in nature. She canoes, she goes
swimming in a lake, she stands by herself on one of those terrifyingly
rickety railroad bridges about a vast gorge, and she stands in the
sunset long enough to let the light do nice things with her face. Kai
Davey-Bellin and Laura-Lynn Petrick direct, and they film everything beautifully, giving it a vintage Super-8 hue.
S is the solo project of Carissa’s Wierd vocalist Jenn Ghetto, who recently announced via Facebook that she will no longer use “Ghetto” as her last name:
okay so I am changing my name,, it’s time for me to stop using “ghetto”
I chose that as my name when I was a teenager and I realize now that it is not my place to be using it.
As I move forward, I want to acknowledge the anti-black racism i perpetuate using the word “ghetto”
and deeply apologize to those that have been hurt by my use of that word.
I am changing all internets and other things related to me that I have
used the word “ghetto” in. Unfortunately i am not financially able to
repress records that I made under the name jenn ghetto.,,
This is part of a process i am in of educating myself and challenging systemic oppression that I will continue to do!
all the love
jenn t. champion
You can read more about Jenn Champion’s name change here. In the meantime, her band has released a new video from last year’s Hardly Art LP Cool Choices. We’ve seen several inventive videos from the project (“Losers,” “Vampires,” “Tell Me,” and “Like Gangbusters!“)
and today Champion presents the quirky, sad visual accompaniment to
“Remember Love.” The video’s description reads as follows: “Sometimes
exes linger in the mind long after they’re gone. Sometimes, they stick
around as skeletons.”
Yak say “No,” but we say yes, yes, yes. The British garage scene has
never sounded better, and London trio Yak are proving precisely that.
Just ahead of their biggest UK headline tour to date, the garage-punk
band have released the video to new track “No.” It’s a riotous visual
endeavor involving nihilistic technicolor that matches the song’s
thrashing guitars and relentless noise. The chaotic track is pulled from
the band’s forthcoming EP of the same name, produced by Pulp’s Steve
Mackey. Judging from the title track, it will contain plenty of the
fiery unrest that marked Yak’s previous releases.
As previously reported, the Belgian-Swedish visual artist Bjorn Tagemos has directed a movie called Gutterdämmerung,
a mythic not-actually-silent silent movie that, paradoxically enough,
features a cast full of rock stars. The truly insane cast of this thing
features Slash, Josh Homme, Lemmy, Grace Jones, Iggy Pop, Justice,
Slayer’s Tom Araya, Volbeat, Mark Lanegan, Nina Hagen, Jesse Hughes, and
Henry Rollins, who also serves as co-writer. It also has a plot about a
Satanic guitar and a fallen angel. It seems insane. And today, we get
to see the first trailer for the movie, which confirms that yes, this
movie will be completely nuts. (It will also look a bit like Zack
Snyder’s Sucker Punch.) W
All-female garage bands are pretty much the greatest things ever,
which makes London newcomers the Big Moon one of the greatest things
ever by default. The four-piece thrives at blending indie rock and
grunge stylings in a way that screams Sonic Youth, but with traces of Ex Hex or Hinds.
Such is the case for the Big Moon’s heartbreak-pop track “Nothing
Without You” and its ridiculously fun accompanying video, directed by
Louis Bhose. They break into some excellent synchronized choreography
that’s sort of an interpretive dance to the song itself, equal parts
adorable and absurd. Streamers fly and headbands are adorned, and though
the judges give the girls an average score of “1,” we’ll give them a
“10” for effort. Maybe the Michael Cera in Juno-esque socks could be reconsidered, though.
Danish punk quartet Yung is the brainchild of 21-year-old Mikkel Holm Silkjær. We recently named them a Band To Watch,
and they’ll play one of their first US shows this Wednesday during CMJ.
To mark that occasion they’ve shared the video for a song “God” off
their latest EP, These Thoughts Are Like Mandatory Chores. The
video alternates between scenes of the band performing their own song as
karaoke and a bit more chilling footage of a snake devouring its prey.
The “God” video was filmed and edited by Andreas Tang and Veronika Maria
Bach.
Enigmatic electronic producer Steven Zhu aka ZHU is readying his new Genesis Series
project, steadily dropping tracks off the guest-heavy release.
Previously he shared “Automatic” featuring AlunaGeorge, and yesterday he
released the jam-packed “Hold Up, Wait A Minute”
featuring Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Trombone Shorty. Continuing that
streak today, he’s dropped a dark and mysterious video for “Automatic.”
Things take a surprisingly violent twist at the end, but I won’t spoil
it for you.
We heard Cheatahs’ single “Signs To Lorelei”
back in September, and today the London-based band has debuted an
accompanying video in which the incandescent song is mirrored by
slow-motion footage of bathers. Shooting a music video underwater is by
no means an inventive concept (we saw Lana Del Rey do it just last week) but the neon-tinged lens in this clip makes for especially good eye-candy.
We’re seeing a whole mini-genre of indie rock fake-karaoke videos,
and most of them are pretty boring. But with their video for the oblique
power-pop jam “Bad Ideas,”
Columbus folk-punks Saintseneca has fixed the problem. We do see
frontman Zac Little singing his own song at karaoke, but we also see him
dancing with a crew of wild-looking masked figures, and riding in an
SUV with those masked figures while they shoot fireworks out the
windows. Maybe this is the fantasy going through the guy’s head while
he’s up on that karaoke stage, or maybe it’s just in there because it
looks cool. Either way, it’s a badass video. Little co-directs with Jon
Washington.
Today, lo-fi bedroom-pop auteur Alex G releases his new album Beach Music, and he’s also followed up his glamorously disheveled “Bug” video with a new one for the strummy, floaty “Kicker.”
This one, from director John Vizzone, mixes murky footage of Alex G
performing live with a spooky, cryptic story about a little kid going on
some adventures and then meeting a strange fate.
As their video for “Regret”
indicated, British art-rockers Everything Everything have a penchant
for the visually surreal. In the newly-released video for “No Reptiles”
they turn the stage into a battlefield, performing the angsty song while
bloodied and visibly beaten down. It doesn’t quite surpass their Kelly Clarkson cover in my mind, but it’s a compelling video for sure.
Last week, relatively unknown entity Lawrence Rothman announced the details behind his next album, which he worked on with Justin Raisen (Sky Ferreira’s Night Time, My Time and Charli XCX’s True Romance).
It features an all-star lineup of guest vocalists, including Kim
Gordon, Ariel Pink, Charli, and Angel Olsen. He also shared his
collaboration with Olsen, called “California Paranoia,”
a haunting little ballad that would probably end up fading into the
background were it not for what he followed it up with: an elaborate,
beautifully composed music video.
The clip was directed by the esteemed Floria Sigismondi, best known for a long list of equally striking music videos and for helming the 2010 biopic The Runaways.
It’s set in an Old Hollywood mental institution and is filled with a
large cast of vividly-imagined characters, including Rothman himself who
plays one of his “alters,” in this case an albino man named Nantucket.
The video’s a textbook example of style over substance, but when the
style is this great, it’s pretty hard to deny.
U.S. Girls (aka Meghan Remy) released her new album, Half Free,
on 4AD last month, and today she’s sharing a new video for “Sororal
Feelings.” The song is a chanting echo-chamber of eerie sentiments,
which translates into its visual representation. Jennifer Hazel co-stars
as Remy’s spectral hairdresser in the LuLu Hazel Turnbull-filmed clip.
Jonny Greenwood - “Roked” Video (Dir. Paul Thomas Anderson)
Earlier this year, we learned that Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood had
gone to India to work on a new album with Radiohead producer Nigel
Godrich and with the Rajasthan Express, a qawwali group from northwest
India. The great director Paul Thomas Anderson went with them to film a documentary
about the process, and he and Greenwood have a tight bond, as Greenwood
contributed amazing scores to the last three Anderson movies. Today, Pitchfork reports that Greenwood’s solo album is called Junun and that it’ll be out next month.
Anderson’s documentary is also called Junun, and you can watch it right now at the streaming service Mubi.
(I’ve never previously heard of Mubi, which costs $5 a month. But the
movie will be up there exclusively for the next month, and $5 for a new
PTA movie seems like a pretty good deal.) A trailer for the movie turns
out to be a montage set to the trancelike new track “Roked,” and
Anderson films the Rajasthan Express musicians recording and traveling
through the city of Jodhpur. More than any other working director,
Anderson has a gift for finding memorable images, and that comes through
even in documentary footage.
Will Butler released his first solo album, Policy, back in March. The record’s second single, the infectious new wave track “Anna,” already has a video
— and it’s a pretty good one, a single unbroken shot of Butler dancing
around in a suit under some nifty hand-drawn effects. But, as promised, the song has now been given a second
video, this time starring Emma Stone. (The new video again centers on
dancing, which makes sense, because it’s a super danceable song.)
Directed by Brantley Gutierrez and choreographed by Ryan Heffington, the
guy responsible for Sia’s hypnotic “Chandelier”
video, the clip features Stone and a whole bunch of sailors performing a
pretty impressive musical theater-esque dance routine aboard the 1936
ocean liner RMS Queen Mary. According to Billboard,
where the video premiered, it’s loosely based off of the legend of “the
Lady in White,” a dancing ghost who supposedly haunts the ship.
Over the summer, Failure released The Heart Is A Monster,
their first album in over 18 years. Today, the band’s released an
interstellar video for the album track “Counterfeit Sky.” It was
directed by Kevin Margo, who also did some visual effects work for the
Marvel movie Thor: The Dark World, and follows a group of astronauts who crash-land on a foreign planet.
Last week, my friend Damian Abraham, the singer of Fucked Up, became a
father for the third time. And somehow, during the hazy initial days of
new parenthood, he did not slow down his busy podcasting schedule.
(Check out his Turned Out A Punk interview with Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace; it’s great.) He did not, however, find the time to appear in the new video for “Don’t Fuck A Gift Horse In The Mouth,”
an 11-minute opus from Toronto post-rockers Fresh Snow, which features
Abraham on guest vocals. But I don’t think that was a scheduling thing,
since I’m pretty sure the members of that band don’t appear either.
Instead, director Ghostprom
gives us a series of images that seem to show women on the run from a
mysterious veiled lady. There’s some nudity towards the end, so heads
up.
Pity Sex just shared “What Might Soothe You?,” the lead single to their upcoming sophomore album White Hot Moon,
last week, and they’re already back with a video for the track. It
alternates between the band playing against a black backdrop and shots
of all of them participating in occult rituals, all framed in a subtly
menacing way. “I was pretty deep into religious symbolism and rituals
when this came into the fold,” the video’s director, Joel Rakowksi, told
The Fader.
“I ended up figuring a pseudo-baptism and indoctrination into the ‘Cult
of Pity Sex’ might work.” He certainly does manage to make joining up
seem enticing, if not a little dangerous.
LA whisper-beat producer Nosaj Thing released his third studio album Fated
earlier this year. One of the best songs off that record was a new
collaboration with Chance The Rapper called “Cold Stares.” (Who can
forget their first, the secret track “Paranoia” on Chance’s Acid Rap?)
Nosaj Thing brings his signature woozy, sensual production to a song
that seems to deal extensively with mental health issues. Chance once
again delivers a poignant verse with some backup from Chicago new soul
group The O’My’s. TAKCOM’s
riveting video for the song combines choreography with animation to
recreate a chilling scene in a mental institution.
Eleanor Friedberger just premiered her first new single since 2013’s Personal Record,
titled “False Alphabet City.” It also marks Friedberger’s first release
since signing to Frenchkiss Records. The track is a theme song of sorts
for Sara Magenheimer’s film False Alphabets, in which
Friedberger plays a radio DJ in New York City. The video for “False
Alphabet City” also serves as a trailer for the film, and features
Friedberger performing and hanging out in SOHO’s Recess gallery.
Low released their latest album, Ones And Sixes, last month, and today they’ve shared a video for one of its singles, “Lies.” Director Manuel Aragon, best known for his film work
sets the scene: “Diego is a jornalero – a day laborer, struggling to
maintain his livelihood. Daily, he navigates between two very different
realities: one, the worker, very much on the outskirts of society,
unseen, unnoticed; the other, a Mexican-American 20-something, one half
of a mixed-race couple trying to sustain their relationship and manage
their cultural differences.” Watch the quiet, contemplative, emotional
video .
A book signing at a Dallas record store last night turned into a surprise reunion concert by the original Alice Cooper band, Dangerous Minds
reports. Good Records had booked the surviving members of the band —
rhythm guitarist and keyboardist Michael Bruce, bassist Dennis Dunaway,
and drummer Neal Smith — to do a signing for Dunaway’s new book Snakes! Guillotines! Electric Chairs!: My Adventures In The Alice Cooper Group,
but Alice Cooper made a surprise appearance, and the band ended up
performing. Ryan Roxie also joined them, filling in for original
guitarist Glen Edward Buxton, who passed away in 1997. They played
“Caught in a Dream,” “Be My Lover,” “Eighteen,” “Is It My Body,” “No
More Mr. Nice Guy,” “Under My Wheels,” and “School’s Out,” and you can
watch some fan-shot footage from the event below.
