Coldplay shared “Everglow,” their song with Gwyneth Paltrow, yesterday, and they’ve followed it today with the video for A Head Full Of Dreams lead single “Adventure Of A Lifetime.” As previously teased, it features the members of Coldplay rendered as dancing CGI apes for some reason. It looks as silly as it did when apes on the AMAs. Mat Whitecross directed the video with help from a huge staff, and you can watch it below.
Earlier this month, Santigold announced her new album 99¢, the follow-up to 2012’s Master Of My Make Believe, and shared its groovy lead single “Can’t Get Enough Of Myself.”
Now she’s given us a video for another track, the promised
iLoveMakonnen collab “Who Be Lovin’ Me,” which was produced by Toronto
electronic duo Zeds Dead. “We met Makonnen on the Mad Decent Boat Party
last year and knew he could kill this beat,” Zeds Dead said in a press
release. “He hit us up and said he and Santigold both were jumping on
it. We’re big fans of hers, so when he brought that back to us it was a
no-brainer. The record just came together really naturally and the final
cut is something we’re all really happy with.” The video, which
Santigold directed along with Trouble Andrew, was filmed back in
September at this year’s Made In America festival in Philadelphia. Watch
below, and watch out for cameo appearances by A-Trak, Big Sean, De La
Soul, DJ Mustard, Earl Sweatshirt, Fabolous, Justine Skye, Meek Mill,
Vic Mensa, and more.
Tame Impala have already shared a couple of hallucinatory videos for Currents’ “Cause I’m A Man” and “Let It Happen,” and now they’ve given us another for “The Less I Know The Better.” Directed by CANADA,
the clip reframes Kevin Parker’s heartsick lyrics as the colorful story
of a basketball player whose cheerleader crush hooks up with a literal
gorilla named Trevor. (Gorilla videos seem to be a new trend?) You can watch the (fairly NSFW) video here.
The Killers’ annual Christmas single (and music video) has now arrived. The “Dirt Sledding” video is the third in a trilogy with 2007’s “Don’t Shoot Me Santa” and 2012’s “I Feel It In My Bones”
starring former Killers tour manager Ryan Pardey as a deranged Santa
trying to murder Brandon Flowers. Except in this one, they seem to make
peace! The power of Christmas! Other holiday mascots including a
Halloween pumpkin, a Thanksgiving turkey/pilgrim, the Easter bunny,
and…the tooth fairy(?) are also there, and actor Richard Dreyfuss shows
up for a few lines in the song. Matthew Gray Gubler directs, and you can
watch here.
M.I.A. has shared the video for her new single “Borders”
via Apple Connect. The self-directed clip features a swaggering Maya
Arulpragasam joining a band of refugees to climb fences, pile onto small
boats, and wade through water. At one point she wears a Paris
Saint-Germain soccer jersey with the “Fly Emirates” logo replaced by
“Fly Pirates.”
Earlier this week, Pusha T announced Darkest Before Dawn, a new album coming next month as a prelude to the long-awaited King Push, which will be arriving this spring. Darkest For Dawn will be accompanied by a short film directed by Kid Art, and now Pusha
has shared a trailer for that, full of portentous voiceover and
religious imagery.
Seattle four-piece Chastity Belt released their very good sophomore LP, Time To Go Home, earlier this year. Most of the videos they’ve given us for its tracks have been charminglo-fi excursions,
but the new clip for “Lydia” is more deliberate in its imagery and
symbolism, constructing a black-and-white dreamworld out of hand-cut
paper scenery. “We were hoping we could shoot the paper in such a way
that it would look dreamy and strange, both delicate and sturdy,”
director Shaun Libman told NPR, where the video premiered. “Every shape and curve…embodies the emotional state of the main character.”
After a long break, Danish proggers Mew returned this year with the new album +-. They’ve already made twovideos for “The Night Believer,” as well as clips for “Satellites,” “Water Slides,” and “Witness,”
and now they’ve got one for the odd smooth-funk tune “Making Friends.”
The new clip throws the band, wearing freaky mime facepaint, into a sort
of half-rotoscoped animated landscape that looks a bit like the
apocalypse. Various weird monsters make appearances, as do foxes,
dinosaurs, and a big meteor. Jonas Bjerre directs, and I have no idea what any of it means.
Over the summer, while she was touring in support of last year’s Sucker
and playing festivals like Glastonbury and Lollapalooza, Charli XCX
filmed a 42-minute documentary about feminism — “the real f-word” — and
what it’s like to be a woman in the music industry, a frequent interview
question that Charli says is “annoying, but still necessary.” In
addition to behind-the-scenes footage of her shows, The F Word And Me
features interviews with other female pop artists including Ryn Weaver,
Hannah Diamond, LIZ, Marina And The Diamonds, and MS MR’s Lizzy
Plapinger talking about their approach to feminism. (Also Jack
Antonoff.) The doc aired tonight on BBC3, and you can watch the entire thing below.
Rustie loves to drop shit unexpectedly! He put out a whole album, EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE, at the beginning of the month with barely any notice, and today he’s put out a video for early single “First Mythz” while doing an AMA over on Reddit. This takes all the dolphin samples in that track to its
logical conclusion, filling the video with various sea life (mostly
dolphins) cut together to match the warp speed of the song.
MMOTHS is the moniker of Jack Colleron, an electronic producer based
out of Ireland that creates dark, evocative music that treads somewhere
between ambient and downtempo. He’s released two EP’s, his self-titled
debut and Diaries, and supported the xx on a few tour dates back in 2012. His debut record, LUNEWORKS, is out next year and he’s shared a video for its lead single “Deu,” directed by Hassan Rahim and Scott J. Ross. Taking a simple and highly interpretive route, the
video consists of two contrasting clips of stark, symbolic imagery,
including burning flowers and long red corridors. Combined with the
ghostly and engrossing electronics of the song, it’s a mystifying
entryway into the work of this new artist.
EL VY, the side-project duo of the National’s Matt Berninger and Menomena’s Brent Knopf, dropped their debut album Return To The Moon
last month, and they’ve just come out with a new video for the brooding
album track “No Time To Crank The Sun.” In this one, we see time-lapse
footage of Berninger and Knopf doing all the album-promotion things that
bands have to do after they get their records ready. They pose for
photos, they play intimate promotional shows, and they do lots and lots
of interviews, presumably answering the same few questions over and
over. (You will not be surprised to learn that Berninger does most of
the talking.) There’s a bit of recording in there, but this is more a
video about all the menial tasks that creative people have to do to make
sure people hear their shit. Tom Berninger — the brother of Matt who
directed the National documentary Mistaken For Strangers, not the actor who was in Major League and Platoon — directs.
For his new single “Dance,”
the Atlanta rap weirdo Rome Fortune got a beat from the Montreal house
producer Kaytranada. And now he also got a video from the director GOLDRUSH.
In the clip, we see cartoon energy crackling across a night-time
cityscape, as Rome Fortune forgets his problems and loses his mind on a
nightclub dancefloor. I don’t know whether the girl in the video is
supposed to be real, or if she’s Rome’s projection, but it’s the rare
rap video in which that’s at least an open question.
Jack Tatum’s shimmering indie-rock project Wild Nothing is returning early next year with Life Of Pause, their first full-length since 2012’s Nocturne. The album was recorded over several weeks in Los Angeles and
Stockholm with producer Thom Monahan; Peter Bjorn & John’s John
Eriksson contributed drums and marimba, and Medicine guitarist Brad
Laner and “a crew of saxophonists” also helped out. In a press release,
Tatum calls the album his most “mature and honest” work to date, and
this is what he has to say about it:
I desperately wanted for this to be the kind of record
that would displace me. I’m terrified by the idea of being any one
thing, or being of any one genre. And whether or not I accomplish that, I
know that my only hope of getting there is to constantly reinvent. That
reinvention doesn’t need to be drastic, but every new record has to
have it’s own identity, and it has to have a separate set of goals from
what came before … There’s definitely a different kind of ‘self’ in the
picture this time around. There’s no real love lost, it’s much more a
record of coming to terms and defining what it is that you have — your
place, your relationships. I view every record as an opportunity to
write better songs. At the end of the day it still sounds like me, just
new.
One song from the LP, “Adore,” was debuted live earlier this year,
and now the band have shared two new tracks, “To Know You” and “TV
Queen,” in the form of one long music video, opening on the same image
of Tatum featured in the album art. Not much actually happens, and I’m
not entirely sure what any of it means — most of the second part appears
to be the same as the first, just from a different perspective and with
minor differences — but it is successful in creating a bizarre,
slightly off-kilter atmosphere.
The dreamy UK band PINS released an impressive album called Wild Nights earlier this year, and we’ve posted their videos for “Young Girls,” “Everyone Says,” and “Dazed By You.”
Their latest clip is for the lovely reverb hymn “Got It Bad,” and it
shows the members of the band wandering around their Manchester hometown
— passing around bottles, waving sparklers, and generally looking like a
gang that you’d like to join. Sarah Jenny Johnson directed the video.
CL is the most visible member of the Korean girl group 2NE1, which
makes her a massive pop star in much of the world and also one of the
forces behind the greatest music video of all time.
Lately, she’s been transitioning to English-language music, switching
back and forth between rapping and singing over huge, fizzy trap
stompers. Earlier this year, she teamed up with Diplo, Riff Raff, and OG
Maco for the ridiculously catchy “Doctor Pepper.” And now she’s got a ridiculously catchy single of her own. CL’s working on her first-ever solo album, and she tells Noisey that the new banger “Hello Bitches” is her “street single.” On the
track, she switches back and forth between English and Korean and
radiates star-level ferocity all over the place. And in the video, she
and a team of dancers take over an abandoned warehouse and project
dangerous levels of charisma. Choreographer Parris Goebel directs.
The short film for David Bowie’s new single “★” premiered just a few minutes ago on Palladia TV and at a screening in Brooklyn. Now, the whole thing is online for everyone to see. It was directed by Johan Renck (who also directed the UK show The Last Panthers,
which uses the track as its theme song). It’s 10 minutes long! It’s
Bowie! Of course it’s weird and a must-watch — do it below.
Miley Cyrus and the Flaming Lips just kicked off a tour in support of their bizarre, messy, occasionally great and occasionally unlistenable album Dead Petz, and now they’ve shared a video for the Mike Will Made It-produced slow jam “Lighter,” which cracked our 5 Best Songs Of The Week
list when it came out in September. “Fuck yeah! After our 1st show in
Chicago (which was totally turnt) we loved seeing y’all singing along to
all the Dead Petz jamsssss but seemed like this one was a fan
favorite!!!!!” Miley wrote in a Facebook post.
“For all of you who can’t be with us in Detroit tonight and of course
for all of you who will here is the official Lighter music video
directed by me and Wayne Coyne featuring Jen Stark’s bad ass animated
kaleidoscopic projections!!!!!” The video features Miley singing,
dancing around, and smoking while slathered in trippy rainbow effects.
Last month, we posted “You Made Me,”
an excellent piece of sneery, minimal club-pop from Dev09, an
18-year-old singer who comes from South Bend, Indiana. After we posted
it, Stelios Phili, the A$AP Ferg collaborator who produced the track,
emailed me and told me that Brett Haley, director of the buzzed-about new movie I’ll See You In My Dreams,
had heard the track on Stereogum and loved it. He liked it so much, in
fact, that he flew to South Bend and filmed the video for free. And so
I’m delighted to report that the new video is really, really good. Haley
films Dev09 as she struts through her hometown, moving through a
skating rink and a machine shop and a few tree-lined suburban streets.
And she has a very serious presence, which is more than enough to carry
the video. I don’t know if music videos can make stars anymore —
especially if the artist in question is an unsigned newcomer — but this
feels like a starmaking performance.
Paris electro-pop duo the Dø tamper with upbeat synths and catchy,
irresistible choruses, and their video for “Trustful Hands” is in
keeping with the same kind of mindful energy. Shot in Japan, the video
acts like a performance art piece of sorts, with members Olivia
Merilahti and Dan Levy dancing and lying on the ground in the middle of a
crowded Tokyo city center, welcoming the gawks of passers-by. The Dø do
French indie in the same vein of acts like Superbus and Phoenix, and
“Trustful Hands” is just all-around delightful. The clips are
interchanged and superimposed by some French New Wave-ish visuals, and
there’s even a brief snippet of Merilahti performing a pretty awesome
rendition of Mariah Carey’s “Hero” on karaoke. “Trustful Hands” is
pulled from the Dø’s third LP Shake Shook Shaken.
The American Music Awards are going down tonight — as in right now —
and during the show, ABC aired an Adele-centric promo for their rebooted
version of The Muppets. It’s a brief Muppet recreation of Adele’s “Hello” video, starring Miss Piggy as Adele and Kermit as her ex.
Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanile put out his last album as Ducktails, St. Catherine,
just a few months ago, and now he’s already followed it up with new
music. Last night, he played a show in St. Gallen, Switzerland, and
today, he shot a video of himself walking through the city, which serves
as the visuals for new track “Don’t Want to Let You Know.” As Pitchfork reports, Mondanile directed the video himself, and it was filmed by
Ross Chait. The song itself exceedingly chill, even by Ducktails
standards, pairing a subtly funky bassline with some chillwave-throwback
synths.
“Crosswords” is the fifth track from Panda Bear Meets The Grim Reaper to get a video, following clips for “Mr Noah,” “Boys Latin,” “Tropic Of Cancer,” and “Come To Your Senses.”
This one was directed by Mount Emult, and stars a very jovial dancer
dude that uses a keycard to enter a building, which I guess brings him
into some other dimension. Or maybe he just takes acid? The rest of the
video is filled with an overload of upside-down, shifting, trippy
visuals. You think anyone in Animal Collective does drugs?
Chvrches released the excellent sophomore album Every Open Eye
a few months ago, and now they’ve given us the first truly great music
video of their career. Chvrches themselves don’t appear in the video for
the Every Open Eye track “Empty Threat.” Instead, the clip
tells the story of a crew of high-school goths from suburban Florida. We
see them getting smashed and going to a waterpark together, and it
looks like so much fun. Director Austin Peters films everything with a naturalistic glow, and it’s a joy to see
suburban goths, who are so often treated as punchlines, being depicted
with real affection like this.
Robin Schulz – “Show Me Love” (Feat. J.U.D.G.E.) (Dir. Zak Stoltz)
These guys managed to make a cheesed-out romantic EDM video that
consists entirely of people falling down and bumping into things, and they found room for a genuinely confounding ending. Salute.
The abstract electronic producer Arca releases his new album Mutant
today, and he’s also got a new video for “Front Load,” one of the
humming instrumentals from the LP. The new video follows Arca’s clips
for “EN” and “Vanity,” and it’s the first video from this album that Arca’s regular collaborator Jesse Kanda directed. This one, like the previous two, focuses very intimately on
Arca’s video, and this time the result is something that you should
absolutely not watch at work. The video is full of blurry, out-of-focus
shots of Arca’s dong, as well as his eye and (I think) the inside of his
mouth.
Last month, the young lo-fi auteur Alex G released Beach Music,
his umpteenth album but his first for a proper label. He’s been
cranking out videos for songs from the album, and we’ve already posted
his clips for “The Curse,” “Bug,” and “Kicker.”
His new clip for the ramshackle campfire strummer “Brite Boy” is a
psychedelic animated affair. It tells the story of two foxes who go on a
road trip that turns into a vision quest and then a funeral, and it
doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Elliot Bech directs.
Last week, the great Virginia rapper (and newly minted G.O.O.D. President) Pusha T reentered our lives with the mean-as-fuck new Timbaland-produced single “Untouchable.” This is reportedly the first taste of Pusha’s new album King Push: Darkest Before Dawn,
which is set to feature appearances from A$AP Rocky, Beanie Sigel, and
The-Dream, as well as production from Kanye West, Q-Tip, Hudson Mohawke,
and Puff Daddy, among others. As Miss Info points out, Pusha has just debuted the “Untouchable” video, in which director Harrison Boyce
films Pusha moving confidently through a sticky, ominous nighttime New
York cityscape. It began as a Tidal exclusive, but now you can watch the
official YouTube version.
Early next year, Tinashe will follow up her excellent R&B debut Aquarius with a new album called Joyride. She’s already made a video for “Player,” the album’s first single, which features Chris Brown. And now, as Miss Info points out, she’s made another clip, for a much better song. “Party Favors”
is a stumbling, spaced-out track that once featured Young Thug, who is
mysteriously absent from the version of the song that just got a video.
In the clip, Tinashe, doing her best to look high out of her mind,
spends some time at a gathering of glamorous art-freaks. It’s a shame
that Thug isn’t in it; he’d probably fit in with this crew better than
Tinashe does.
‘Tis the season! The Darkness already had one very successful holiday track with “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)” when their debut sensation was released back in 2003, but they’re giving it another go in their post-comeback era with “I Am Santa,” a ridiculous song with an equally ridiculous music video. They straightened out a little bit with their most recent record, Last Of Our Kind,
but they still know how to give into the glam better than most, and
they retreat back to old habits for this. Of course, it’s catchy and a
lot of fun — watch via Noisey.
Porches released their latest single, “Hour,” last month and announced that they’ve signed to Domino Records. Pool
is due out in February, and that first single is just a small taste of
the new sonic landscape that Aaron Maine has been delving into in the
years since Slow Dance In The Cosmos was released. The song
also features vocals by Maine’s collaborator and partner Greta Kline
(aka Frankie Cosmos), and their relationship was documented in a recent feature
penned by Colin Joyce. The Alan Del Rio Ortiz-directed video for “Hour”
features Kline and Maine driving through the suburbs in the hours
before dawn. The neon light that illuminates their profiles turns this
peaceful night drive into something a bit more sinister; It has that
threatening, intoxicating Drive aesthetic.
Last month, Majical Cloudz released Are You Alone?, a stark and powerful new album. The two members of the group directed the album’s first two videos, for “Silver Car Crash” and “Downtown,”
and they both followed the same intimate format, with frontman Devon
Welsh staring into the camera with an almost unsetting familiarity.
Their new clip for “Game Show” is different. While it’s the official
video, it’s an actual live clip, recorded at the duo’s record release
show at New York’s National Sawdust last month. In monolithic
black-and-white, we see the duo performing on a flower-strewn stage,
with some geometrically fascinating architecture behind them. Bill Kirstein directs.
Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek wrote original music for a MAKE Beauty
collaborative film. “The Boy Who I’ll See Again” is a reworking of the
Greek myth of Endymion, and the Adam McClelland-directed clip provides
an illustration of the tale. The black and white, cut-and-paste
aesthetic of the short film recalls surrealist cinema of the 1920s,
particularly the work of Luis Buñuel. You can download Polachek’s song for free at the MAKE Beauty site.
One of the many highlights from Julia Holter’s latest auteur-pop treasure Have You In My Wilderness is the gently unassuming, quietly building “Silhouette.” That track now
has a video to go along with it, directed by Rick Bahto, featuring
Holter listlessly hanging out at home, a fair bit of the titular
silhouettes, and some venetian blinds. It’s an elegantly unfussy video,
much like the song it accompanies.
Tool announced their first run of 2016 tour dates today, and today the Maynard James Keenan-led band Puscifer released a new video for “The Remedy” off of their recent album Money Shot.
The Adam Rothlein and Puscifer-directed clip centers around a boxer,
and scenes of his life are interspersed with footage of the band
performing. Loudwire premiered the video today.
Over the course of his long career, the former Velvet Underground
member John Cale has recorded a few different versions of his song
“Close Watch”; different versions of it have appeared on his 1975 album Helen Of Troy and his 1982 album Music For A New Society. (Courtney Barnett also covered the song earlier this year.) Early next year, Cale will M:FANS, a new reworking of Music For A New Society
that’ll also include a remastered version of that album and three
unreleased bonus tracks. The newest version of “Close Watch” features a
clanking synthetic beat and a backing vocal from the Dirty Projectors’
Amber Coffman. And in director Abigail Portner’s
new “Close Watch” video, we see Cale and Coffman attending a creepy
fancy-dress ball together in the middle of the day.
Public Access T.V. have just shared a video for “In Love And Alone,” the B-side to their recent “Patti Peru”
single. The clip shows the four band members in a whirlwind night
around New York City, coming in and out of bars, restaurants, and
arcades around the East Village and Chinatown, all as a camera hurriedly
follows them throughout.
Great Grandpa released their debut EP, Can Opener,
at the beginning of the year. It’s five songs worth of knotty, twisted,
and warm rock music that’s as melodically satisfying as it is, at
times, confounding. The Seattle band has a knack for making sure
everything slides into place with just the right amount of irregular
edges, and they prove how well of a handle they have on that balance
time and time again throughout their debut. They’re a band that shines
just as brightly in individual moments as they do over the course of a
whole song. And while it’s easy to drift off and follow one interlocking
rhythm to its conclusion and lose the forest for the trees a bit, the
forest is just as well-structured as those smaller moments. Great
Grandpa borrow from some obvious touchstones, they never feel too
comfortable settling into just one for too long, a promising proclivity
for such a young band.
Can Opener is getting a vinyl reissue later this year, and
the band’s releasing a video for EP highlight “Mostly Here” to draw
attention to it. Opening with a sigh of chords, the track heaves along
with a weary lack of energy. The video for it is similarly languid, as
all five members of the band come to rest in the wetlands, playing the
song off of children’s instruments and staring drearily into the camera.
It was directed by Pat Goodwin.
The Silence was built from the remnants of the Japanese psych band Ghost (not to be confused with the Swedish metal band
of the same name). Fronted by Masaki Batoh, the group released their
self-titled debut album as the Silence earlier this year via Drag City, and they already have another new one on the way called Hark The Silence. We’ve heard one track from the record — “Ancient Wind Part 2”
— and today they’ve shared another one, “Little Red Record Company.”
It’s a gently picked paean that bursts apart in its final minutes,
blossoming into a horn-heavy celebration. The track is attached to a
video directed by Kazuo Ogino.
Hypatia, a Greek philosopher and mathematician, was murdered in Egypt
by a mob of fanatical Christian monks in 415 AD. Being one of history’s
first female scholars and also an avowed paganist, her symbol as a
genius and contrarian thinker has inspired artists and authors
throughout time. Director Dawn Carol Garcia, who’s formerly made videos for Destroyer,
is now adding her piece to the legacy by centering WRAY’s new
phantasmagoric video around the ever-enigmatic Hypatia. Throughout the
colorful montage of Egyptian symbols and cutesy scenes (one includes an
adorable puppy), a woman learns about Hypatia on television and makes
out with her in a lucid dream. It’s the first video and title track from
Wray’s upcoming sophomore LP, Hypatia, which will be dropped in early 2016.
The confrontational New York rapper Mykki Blanco has a history of making intense, iconic music videos, and the new clip for “Coke White, Starlight,” a track from Blanco’s new C-ORE compilation, certainly fits the bill. Blanco and director Tristan Patterson
filmed the clip in Greece, and it shows Blanco dressed up like Marilyn
Monroe, staring at televised Nazi rallies, and plunging underwater to
stab an octopus with a knife. It’s a vivid and psychedelic vision of a
video, and even though it has a narrative that’s not easy to figure out,
there’s still a “to be continued” tag at the end. Below, watch the
video and read some words about it from Blanco.
Last week, West Coast R&B hedonist Ty Dolla $ign finally released his official full-length debut Free TC, and now he’s shared a new video for the E-40-featuring, DJ Mustard-produced “Saved.”
Directed by Elliott Sellers, it depicts Ty$ hanging out on a throne in
the clouds while attractive women writhe around beside him. E-40 is
there too.
Canadian alt-pop stars Metric released their Pagans In Vegas album a couple of months ago, and now they’ve followed up their video for “The Shade”
with a new one for the strummy stomp “The Governess.” This one focuses
exclusively on frontwoman Emily Haines. First, it shows her piloting an
old convertible through the Nevada desert and rocking out outside a
beat-up trailer. Then, we see her carrying a beat-up guitar case down
the Las Vegas strip. It’s the sort of mythic Americana that only a
foreigner would make. Lauren Graham — not the one from Gilmore Girls and Parenthood — directs.
Joey Bada$$ released his collaboration with the Canadian singer and multi-instrumentalist Kiesza, “Teach Me,” way back in January as a single off of this year’s B4.DA.$$.
The song rides on the introductory line: “Won’t you teach me how to
dance,” which makes the accompanying video an enjoyable non-surprise.
Rik Cordero directs as Bada$$, Kiesza, and co. take on the streets of
New York-
Not long after releasing their visceral Time Management EP, the New York noise-punk duo Yvette have a new video for the industrial-strength ripper “Calm And Content.” Anthony Sylvester and Ant DeRose directed the clip, which focuses on the two band members
and which makes for an appropriately harrowing complement to the song.
The video is all quick-edit flashes and sweaty, uncomfortable zoom-ins,
and it depicts both band members as big-eyed, blank-faced automatons.
April Camlin and Al Schatz comprise WUME, a self-described radical
Baltimore band, formerly of Chicago. They’ve toured with Dan Deacon and
collaborated with Matmos’ M.C. Schmidt and are named after Wümme, the
German town were Faust recorded its early music. Now WUME are back on
the road, and to herald the tour dates they’ve shared a video for “Gold
Leaf” from their recent album MAINTAIN. The song is a squiggly,
synth-driven instrumental that manages to be reflective and buoyant all
at once; fans of the aforementioned Faust or Deacon will probably dig
it. It’s accompanied by a video by Danielle Criqui and John Jones
featuring the checkered-flag equivalent to It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’s Green Man living his life.
A couple of months ago, Empress Of released Me, a very good album of auteurist pop music. And after giving us a vivid, memorable music video for “Standard,” she’s got a new one for the blippy, contemplative “Icon.” The new video works as a sort of ode to solitude, with director Eli Born filming Lorely Rodriguez in an autumn forest and on a busy New York
street, soaking up sunlight and dancing to whatever’s playing in her
earbuds. On the video, Rodriguez writes, “I found a cinematographer that
I loved and we just talked to each other for a couple of weeks. It was
this kind of co-direction, we talked about what the song meant, how I
wanted it to look, where we wanted to shoot, and how we would get the
feeling of the song out of these locations. It was by far my favorite
music video I’ve made.”
Weezer’s new single “Thank God For Girls”
already got a fairly involved cannoli binge eating lyric video, but
apparently that wasn’t enough because the band’s just shared an official
video for the track. It continues with the religious imagery that was
featured on its Pope-starring artwork
— Rivers Cuomo is an evangelical preacher who also plays poker with a
bunch of women in his spare time, and rightfully gets his ass kicked at
the end.
Last month, the London production duo Snakehips came out with “All My Friends,”
an excellent pop lament about constantly being around fucked-up people.
The track features both Tinashe and Chance The Rapper, and while Chance
doesn’t appear in the new video for the song, Tinashe does. She serves
as a sort of Greek chorus for the video, which lingers on a line of kids
waiting to get into a club, each of them playing out their own little
stories. The camera is as much a character as any of the actual humans,
and before you ask, yes, the video does feature someone puking into a
trashcan. Mister Whitmore directed the video, structuring it as one long tracking shot, albeit one with some obvious edit points.
Last week, Sean “Diddy” Combs went back to his old Puff Daddy moniker and released the shockingly strong free mixtape MMM. The one advance single from that tape was “Workin,” a track that samples Toro Y Moi dance-music side project Les Sins’ 2014 single “Bother.” And today, Puff has shared his “Workin” video, as Nah Right points out. Hype Williams, the music-video genius who most recently directed Puff’s “Finna Get Loose”
video, is once again behind the camera. But for a Hype Williams video,
this one is relatively low-impact. It’s just Puff and crew striking
tough-guy poses while Williams projects colorful, psychedelic lights all
over them.
People who are into wrestling are really fucking into wrestling, and
people who aren’t still tend to want to look on with curious
fascination. Such is the case with A Sunny Day In Glasgow’s new video
for “Hey, You’re Mine,” which features OTW Pro Wrestling members hanging
out before matches and fighting in the ring. It’s an odd accompaniment
to the mellow, shoegazey single, which was officially released today on
the band’s new double EP Planning Weed Like It’s Acid / Life Is Loss, but in this case, the contrast works. The clip was created by Jen Goma, Ty Flowers, and Jon Cooper.
Panic! at the Disco have dropped the epic clip for new single "Vicorious." Death of a Bachelor, the band's fifth album and first with Brendon Urie as its sole member, will be released on January 15th via Fueled By Ramen/DCD2 Records.
Weezer's Rivers Cuomo helped write the dynamic rock song with Urie, and the video is just as massive as the track. The clip opens with Urie in a boxing ring preparing for and subsequently winning a match. The video cuts to a less celebratory Urie in his home after his girlfriend has broken up with him. When he fights the urge to call his ex, he's presented with a large, $1 million check.
Fantastical victories, like a key to the city, reward his positive, post-break-up behavior. The clip ends with Urie back in the winning boxing ring after meeting and successfully falling in love with someone new.
In April, founding member and drummer Spencer Smith left Panic! at the Disco following a two-year hiatus to recover from drug and alcohol abuse. Smith and Urie had released two albums as a duo following the departure of other founding members Ryan Ross and Jon Walker, including 2013's Too Weird to Live, Too Rare to Die!
Coldplay love to tease! Before announcing their new album, A Head Full Of Dreams, they planted enough bread crumbs for fans to figure out the release date and title. Before releasing their first single, “Adventure Of A Lifetime,” they sent out a snippet
of the track. And now, a few weeks before the video for that song is
out, they’ve given us a preview of what the video will look like. It’s
weird! They all dress up in motion capture suits and are turned into
some Planet Of The Apes-looking gorillas. Very bizarre! Check out the clip below.
Pearl Jam have played many, many classic rock covers over the years, but one song they’ve never done as a band is Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” (Eddie Vedder has sung it with Roger Waters,
but that’s it.) Last night, the band covered “Comfortably Numb” for the
first time in Porto Alegre, Brazil, while rain poured down on the
crowd. This was the first song of the second set of encores in what
would turn out to be a 34-song set; Pearl Jam don’t fuck around. At the
same show, they also covered Pink Floyd’s “Interstellar Overdrive” and
Neil Young’s “Fuckin’ Up.” Watch a fan-made video of the “Comfortably
Numb” cover.
AURORA’s “Half The World Away” cover turns an Oasis song into a
wistful piano ditty with a constellation of quality influences. The
track strikes me as noirish Lana Del Rey torch song performed with
Tobias Jesso Jr.’s doe-eyed innocence and a microscopic pinch of Joanna
Newsom’s vocal creak. It’s like something out of a Disney cartoon about a
doomed lounge singer. The 18-year-old Norwegian made an instant
impression on me, and not just because of the striking visuals in the
accompanying video, but those are quite pretty too, as you’ll see.
Poliça are back for their third album of experimental, foreboding synth-pop. United Crushers is the name of their new record, and it’s the followup to 2013’s Shulamith.
The group once again teamed up with producer Ryan Olson, and together
they wrote the record at their home base of Minneapolis at the tail-end
of two years of touring before going to Sonic Ranch Studios in El Paso,
TX to record it. The record’s lead single, “Lime Habit,” retains the
band’s sense of weightless and blows the dust off a lot of what they
were doing before. It comes attached to a music video directed by The Sunset People.
David Bowie will release the first single for his new album Blackstar (stylized ★) on Thursday (11/19) accompanied by a short film shot by Johan Renck, the director of The Last Panthers TV series that uses the track for its title credits sequence. The “★” video will premiere globally at 3:50PM EST on Palladia. Brooklyn’s Nitehawk Cinema will also be holding screenings for the short film that day — details here. For now, you can watch a new 30-second preview of the track and video.
Damon Albarn wrote the music for wonder.land, a 21st century, Digital Age musical update of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice In Wonderland.
Moira Buffini wrote the script and lyrics and the National Theatre’s
Rufus Norris is directing, and the show debuted in Manchester over the
summer. We’ve seen one trailer already, and now there’s another, featuring footage filmed during the Manchester run.
Experimental producer and vaporwave progenitor James Ferraro has a new album, the Los Angeles-inspired SKID ROW,
coming out tomorrow, and today he’s shared a new video for “Thrash
& Escalate.” Directed by Elsa Henderson and Ferraro himself, the
clip combines aerial footage of darkened highways with white silhouettes
of angels superimposed onto images of factories and smog, and the song
itself sounds like a hazy collage of urban detritus.
Popcaan got a big bump for his brand with his feature on Jamie xx’s “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),”
but the Jamaican dancehall artist’s star has been ascendant for a
while. His latest single, “Dem Wah Fi Know,” comes attached to a video
that highlights his heritage by following around Popcaan and his friends
through his hometown of Portmore and observing what’s changed for them.
Here’s director Focus Creeps on the video:
I had always been really moved by Popcaan as a sincere
and uplifting songwriter. When I began thinking of ideas for this track,
which is more paranoid in a street sense, I started thinking about how
when you make an effort to do what’s good—to take risks, like Popcaan
did—there’s always the dark stuff that you have to leave behind. The
duppy mythology seemed like a perfect metaphor for the kind of
confidence it takes for a Jamaican artist to rise up against the
adversity, haters, and corruption that will always be an obstacle for
those who put their faith and energy into something positive. This song
is about keeping one eye on the look out towards that dark stuff you
conquered but can always rise up to haunt you.
Future seems to be on a mission to make a video for every song on his amazing recent album DS2. Not long after his clips for “The Percocet & Stripper Joint” and “Slick Talk,”
he’s got a new one for the florid, piano-led “Colossal.” This one is
shot guerrilla-style, mostly on tour, and it’s got a lot of footage of
Future onstage, driving a Phantom, and boarding a private jet. Quick
celebrity cameos abound: Drake, Diddy, DJ Khaled, Chief Keef. Rick Nyce directs.
We named Haybaby a Band To Watch back in August, and recently included them on our list of the 50 Best New Bands Of 2015. The Brooklyn-based trio makes acerbic, heartfelt rock, and “Doored” is one of the most aggressive songs on their new album Sleepy Kids.
The song’s accompanying video channels that aggression nicely; a woman
on crutches assaults oblivious individuals who won’t get out of her way
on the streets of Brooklyn. Watching this makes me anxious because I
fucking hate winter in New York… and it’s coming. Check out the clip
below by way of Brooklyn Vegan.
The Louisville four-piece White Reaper released their latest album, White Reaper Does It Again, this past summer, and since then we’ve been treated to several videos from the band. The clip for “Last 4th Of July” was action packed, and this new Matt Fulks-directed video for “Make Me Wanna Die” (which The Needle Drop
premiered today) is similarly antagonistic and goofy. Watch below as
the Grim Reaper wreaks havoc on a suburban town and eventually gets
arrested.
The adventurous Portland/New Zealand indie-pop scamps Unknown Mortal Orchestra tried out a sort of itchy white-funk sound on Multi-Love,
the new album they released earlier this year, and its songs have some
serious legs. They’ve also been making the best music videos of their
career. Their new clip for “Necessary Evil” is a psychedelic animated
affair, and those aren’t always great. But this one has a big central
idea. It shows us a male and female character coming together and
breaking apart in all sorts of body-melting ways, and it works as an
extended metaphor for romantic distance, for the way we can never really
know another person. Sean Solomon directs.
Tomorrow, Ty Dolla $ign releases his long-awaited Free TC album. I’ve heard it, and it’s very good. But before that, as Miss Info points out, he’s just released a kinetic, low-tech new video for “Violent,” one of the songs from the Airplane Mode mixtape that he released a couple of weeks ago. Gabe Shaddow directed the video, which mostly mixes murky live-performance video
with totally unnecessary clips from many of the police shootings that
have been in the news lately. But the live footage is cool, because it’s
got all these images of Ty$ singing in front of huge and very excitable
crowds. Where are these huge circle pits happening? Is that just what
Wiz Khalifa shows look like these days?
David Moore’s minimalist classical ensemble Bing & Ruth are reissuing their 2010 debut City Lake this week, and to go along with the remastered LP, they’ve been releasing new visuals for its tracks. While the video for “Rails”
was an impressionistic portrait of train travel, the clip for album
opener “Broad Channel” has an actual narrative, albeit an allegorical,
somewhat inscrutable one. Set to the song’s meditative stream of piano,
clarinet, warm swells of cello, and wordless vocal sighs, an old man
traverses various scenic landscapes, carting along a wheelbarrow and a
mysterious briefcase. Director Alex Priestley explains:
Inspired by the majestic spaciousness of Bing &
Ruth’s instrumentation, along with the epic scope of their musical
landscapes, I sought to translate these abstract forms into powerful
visuals through the use of landscape, journey and a hint of the
supernatural.
The repeated piano motif, so consistent and unwavering, seemed to
suggest a journey, whilst the eerie, melancholic synths had an
otherworldly quality that I tried to capture by stripping my landscapes
of human civilization. Only ancient relics — a ruined abbey, a disused
viaduct, a prehistoric burial chamber — would remain, as though this old
man on his mysterious quest travelled through some parallel world;
earth, yet not earth. The addition of a surreal element seemed to suit
this otherworldly atmosphere, where trapped souls can be extracted with
magical devices, and swaying statues can come to life with the soul of
the universe.
Through experimenting with narrative and subject, I wanted to
challenge the assumption that ambient music is always best accompanied
by abstract visuals.
It’s now been more than 10 years since Missy Elliott, the great
late-’90s/early-’00s rap futurist, released her last album, and a whole
generation has been deprived of the amazing stop-the-world feeling that
comes when Missy drops a new video. Well, no longer. Missy teased “WTF
(Where They From),” a new collaboration with fellow Virginian iconoclast
Pharrell Williams, on Monday Night Football
last month. And now we get to hear the song and, more importantly, see
the incredible video. The track, with its propulsive beat and
nonsensical fly talk, is vintage Missy, and the video is even more
vintage Missy. It’s one long surrealist dance attack, with Missy
dressing like a disco ball and hosting a dance party in what looks like a
cryogenic freezing chamber. We also get to see dancing marionette
puppet version of both Missy and Pharrell. It’s so awesome. Missy co-directed the video with her old collaborator Dave Meyers.
Blur’s hybrid documentary-concert film New World Towers will screen for the first time next month in the UK. We’ve already seen the official trailer,
and today the band has shared another clip from the movie. In this one,
Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon extol the magic of their live
performances, of which two will be featured in the film.
Plaitum is the charmingly misspelled, SEO-friendly name of this new
London group, and noisy goth-pop is their game. The duo — consisting of
Matt Canham and Abi Dersiley — are gearing up to release their
self-titled debut EP next month, and “LMHY” is their muscular,
back-bending lead single. It’s equal parts post-Lorde moody swelling and
drilling, industrial smack. Their debut effort was produced by the
masterful Paul Epworth, and will be released on his own label, Wolf
Tone, so the two of them come with some established pedigree in tow. The
video for “LMHY,” which was directed by Julian House, is all shimmery
lens flares and sun-spotted shadows.
Long Beard’s Sleepwalker
is a subtly devastating debut because it’s not easily classified as
“sad music.” Leslie Bear’s voice is certifiably breathy, weaving itself
in and out of distinct layers of atmospheric instrumentation, and Sleepwalker’s
appeal lies in the fact that it could be background music, or it could
soundtrack the moments after a mental breakdown. It’s a relief, then,
that Long Beard’s video for “Turkeys” is a lighthearted, fun interpretation of the stirring single. Watch a ghostly Bear chase her bandmates around below by way of Brooklyn Vegan.
Alt-country seems to be going through something of a renaissance, and
New Zealand’s Marlon Williams fits right in among the pack. Though the
singer doesn’t come from the heartland, he still has enough twang and
blues to pull it all off. His video for “Hello Miss Lonesome,” a track
off his forthcoming debut solo album, features a vicious, elaborately
choreographed fight between Williams and an assailant. As he gets
alternatively punched around and wooed, the duo travels through an empty
building until he’s stripped down bare. Check out the NSFW clip via The Fader below.
Every once in awhile, a video comes along that makes me feel like I’m
not living my life to its fullest potential. Maybe instead of hanging
out in New York and going to shows and paying my rent and begging my
super to fix the toilet, I should be galavanting around the USA. I could
tour with a band! I could work on a farm! I could fuck off back to
California and learn how to surf and work at a head shop! Of course, I’m
not going to do any of these things because I’m happy where I’m at, but
Beach Slang’s video for “Bad Art & Weirdo Ideas” (off of their latest album The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us) makes me feel young/wild/free and detached from any responsibilities. Watch below via Pitchfork.
NZCA Lines — the project of London-based Michael Lovett — announced his sophomore record, Infinite Summer, last month with the debut of “Persephone Dreams.”
Today, he’s shared a super weird video for that song. It starts off as
your typical drunken courtship at an empty bar — boy annoys girl, they
end up dancing and heading home together — but things take a turn once
they start going at it. She has, like, a black hole in her chest? And
she consumes him?? It’s really weird! I did not expect that going in!!
More evidence that you should never hook up with anyone ever. The video
was directed and conceived by Alina Landry Rancier.
Young Thug released his excellent new mixtape Slime Season 2 on Halloween, and now he’s shared visuals for the Trouble-featuring
track “Thief In The Night.” Directed by Be El Be, as usual, the clip
bookends a fairly standard (albeit dependably trippy) strip club video
with the narrative of two women drugging and robbing some dude that
picks them up at a gas station.
There are lots of good reasons to go see Patti Smith play a New York
show if you get a chance, but here’s an extra one: There’s a pretty high
probability that Michael Stipe will play a surprise solo set at the
show. Last year, Stipe played his first-ever solo set,
which included a Perfume Genius cover, when he served as the surprise
opener for a Patti Smith show at Webster Hall. And last night, as Pitchfork reports,
Stipe did it again, serving as Smith’s surprise opener at the Beacon
Theatre. He did an acoustic all-covers set with a tiny backing band.
According to Pitchfork, Stipe’s set included covers of Boy George’s “The
Crying Game” and John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Bethlehem Steel — the very good Brooklyn band fronted by Becca Ryskalczyk — just released their newest EP, Docking, last week, and today they’ve shared a video for searing lead single “87s.”
In it, the band and some friends play the childhood game ninja in
softly lit black-and-white. Gameplay involves a lot of poses and sharp
movements, which makes the video particularly eye-catching, and the dark
palette complements the song’s mood. For those of you familiar with the
game — it could just be a regional thing? Always hard to tell — it’s a
fun look at something you probably haven’t played since the schoolyard.
For those that haven’t, see if you can parse the rules below.
Seth Bogart (of Hunx And His Punx) will release a new album next year
by way of the storied So Cal garage rock label Burger Records. The
album’s first single, “Eating Makeup,”
is a smarmy, in-your-face gritty pop song featuring vocals by Kathleen
Hanna. The song’s new Jennifer Juniper Stratford-directed video evokes
Pee Wee’s Playhouse and some of John Waters’ tamer films.
“We Are Dreamers!” was a collaboration with Savages’ Jehnny Beth, and Tindersticks’ second single from The Waiting Room
is a duet too. The chamber-pop slow-burn “Hey Lucinda” matches Stuart
Staples’ mannered baritone with Lhasa De Sela’s weary, high-pitched
intonations. Their vocals are cast against an array of rock, folk, and
classical instruments that come and go at surprising, rewarding
intervals. As with “We Are Dreamers!” and every other song on the album,
“Hey Lucinda” arrives with a short film, this one by Rosie Pedlow and
Joe King. The directors explained their creative process to Indie Wire:
When we first heard “Lucinda,” we were struck by the way
the instruments were used to help tell the story. The glockenspiel at
the start reminded us of those wind-up musical Ballerina boxes that
grind to a halt; the lurching rhythms of the backwards strings and steel
drums made us feel a bit drunk. We decided to use camera movement to
echo the toing and froing of the duet, filming from opposite ends of the
street in a series of mini tracking shots. Lhasa’s end would be the
sleepy chalets; Stuart’s would be amusements. We used a camera slider to
repeat the same shot allowing us to layer and cross-fade real time,
slow motion and timelapse seamlessly. We wanted to convey not only
something about the experiential nature of time but also something about
memory and how it fades. We ramped each shot up and down and brought it
to a halt just like a ballerina box and used time-lapse to inject a bit
of “drunkenness” into the image.
Earlier this year, Kristian Matsson, the Swedish folk singer who
records as the Tallest Man On Earth, released the gorgeously layered new
album Dark Bird Is Home.
Today, he’s shared a video for the lushly propulsive album track
“Darkness Of The Dream.” In it, we see Matsson hitting a dance studio
with a pair of modern dancers and trying out some impressively tricky
choreography. (This is the point where I’m obligated to point out that
if Matsson were really the tallest man on earth, they might not
have been able to lift him so easily.) We also see him roaming across a
barren, rocky landscape with a very cute small dog in tow. Jakob Wallin directed the video.
UK R&B singer and producer Dornik has shared a video for the
funky, hyperactive “Strong,” a cut off his self-titled debut album from
earlier this year. Only because it was so prominent so recently, the
pastel colors here are definitely reminiscent of “Hotline Bling” by way
of James Turrell, but really it just looks like any music video that
features people dancing against a backdrop. At least some of this
dancing is actually good! There’s also a lot of fluidity to this one,
with flashing lights and shifting geometric shapes. It was directed by
Charlie Rotberg.
The wonderfully sad British pop group Daughter have released a new
video for their track “Numbers,” which involves a mysterious red-coated
woman wandering around the streets of an urban city and doing things
like setting a homeless person on fire and watching a man choking to
death at a restaurant. Elena Tonra’s masterfully somber lyrics and
vocals dress the track in melancholy colors typical of Daughter: a
wistful venture into dark, moody dream-pop. “Numbers” is the second
track to be released from the band’s forthcoming sophomore LP, following
lead single “Doing The Right Thing.”
Sometimes, it seems like everything John Malkovitch has done in the decade and a half since Being John Malkovitch is one long extended wheel-spin, because what the fuck can you possibly do after that? Case in point: Malkovitch’s new project Like A Puppet Show,
on which Malkovitch reads Plato over music from his collaborator Eric
Alexandrakis, and then various all-star musicians remix it. We’ve
already heard Rik Ocasek’s random-ass contribution, and now, thanks to Rolling Stone,
we get to hear what happens when Yoko Ono and her son Sean Lennon get
ahold of one of those tracks. The end result is called “Cryolife 7:14
A.M.,” and it really does sound like Malkovitch reading Plato while Ono
and Lennon do unrelated things. It sounds like trash! Check it out
below!
In recent years, we’ve heard the enigmatic electronic producer Steven Zhu, who records as ZHU, team up with AlunaGeorge on “Automatic” and with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony and Trombone Shorty on “Hold Up, Wait A Minute.”
He’s now joined forces with Skrillex and with the L.A. R&B duo
THEY. for the slinky new track “Working For It.” And the track also has a
noirish black-and-white animated video, which tells a cryptic story
about an elite assassin and which includes a car-and-helicopter chase
scene.
Sia’s new single “Alive” is a barnstorming operatic howler that was originally intended for Adele’s forthcoming album 25. (Sia co-wrote it with Adele and Tobias Jesso Jr.) Instead, it’s leading off This Is Acting, Sia’s forthcoming LP of songs written for other people. And like the clips on her last album 1,000 Forms Of Fear,
the new video for “Alive” features a bewigged stand-in for Sia doing
something very impressive. This time around, it’s a very small child, in
a two-toned Sia wig, doing a fast and sharp and impressive display of
martial arts. She’s by herself in a huge room, so she’s not actually
kicking anyone’s asses, but you just know she could. It’s a vivid and memorable clip.
London’s investigative-journalist Coldplay heads were right: Coldplay’s new album A Head Full Of Dreams
is coming out at the top of next month. This time around, the album
comes absolutely stuffed with guests: Beyoncé, Noel Gallagher, Swedish
rising pop star Tove Lo, gospel howler/”Gimme Shelter” backup singer
Merry Clayton. It looks like Brian Eno had no hand in the proceedings;
instead, Coldplay worked with the glossy Norwegian pop-production team
Stargate, as well as longtime collaborator Rik Simpson. They recorded
the album in Malibu, L.A., and London.
Frontman Chris Martin has been talking about this album as maybe their last one. In an interview with Zane Lowe last year,
he said that the new LP would be “the completion of something” and
elaborated: “I have to think of it as the final thing we’re doing.
Otherwise we wouldn’t put everything into it.” So we might not have
Coldplay to kick around too much longer anymore.
The album’s first single is certainly a bright, sparkly pop tune, even by this band’s standards. We’ve already heard a bit
of “Adventure Of A Lifetime,” but the whole thing is online now. And
it’s a Coldplay take on disco-funk, with an Afro-pop guitar figure and
some strutting rhythm-section work along with all the usual vague
uplift. Below, check out the new song, the album’s tracklist, and watch
the band doing a comedy bit for BBC Radio 1 in which they try to make
hits out of the most boring lyrics possible.
LA duo Deap Vally’s 2013 debut Sistrionix was full of
crunchy, bluesy garage rock, and they’re following that up next year
with another full-length, this one produced by the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Nick
Zinner. The group has got the ball rolling with “Royal Jelly,” an
attitude-filled track that’s accompanied by a video starring the two
members, Mick Jagger’s daughter Georgia May, and a cameo from Zinner as a
bartender. Check it out via DIY.
Arca, the Venezuelan producer and Björk/Kanye West/FKA twigs collaborator, has a new album called Mutant
coming out later this month. Over the weekend, he shared a video for
“Vanity,” a new track that sounds like a trap-rave banger that’s been
drowned in honey and tar. Like his recent “EN”
clip, the video is a murky, mysterious affair that focuses on Arca
himself. It mixes blurry city-at-night imagery with shots of Arca,
dressed and posed seductively, in a bed and a swimming pool. Arca
co-directed the video with the photographer Daniel Sannwald, his boyfriend, and it’s a whole lot more intimate than anything most artists will ever give us. Check it out below.
DJDS, the L.A. dance-producer duo of Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy,
used to go by the name DJ Dodger Stadium, and they gave us the great
album Friend Of Mine last year. In August, they unveiled their name change with a memorable, oddly beautiful video for “You Don’t Have To Be Alone.” And with the new album Stand Up And Speak coming early next year, they’ve made another one for the urgent title track,
bringing some of the same apocalyptic-impressionism vibes as their last
video. This one shows us little kids, in gas masks and hazmat suits,
boogie-boarding on a beach outside what looks like a chemical plant.
It’s beautifully shot, but it’s also a loaded and sobering vision. Daniel Pappas and Nick Walker, the group’s regular collaborators, once again direct.
Unlike the more prominent Ellie that also released new music this week, Herring sounds like she knows
what makes a big pop song, which is why it’s so fun to see her slyly
invert the formula at every turn. Herring’s music falls definitively
under the electronic umbrella, but she’s engaging and personality-filled
in a way that this type of music often isn’t. “Why’d You,” the Kentucky
producer’s dizzying new single, is an art-rave freakout of triumphant
proportion, built on a beat that sounds like a heart palpitation. Little
cackles fly off in the background, as if the track itself is sizing up
the listener to see if they can handle the rush. “Why’d You” breaks down
and builds itself back up again, proudly displaying the mechanisms that
make it tick, like a pop song with all the air sucked out of it.
A few days ago, “greatest working rock star” Eric Church sent his new album out as a surprise to members of his fan club, and it made its way online via Apple Music a little while later. The title track and purported lead single “Mr.
Misunderstood” also got a video to go along with it, featuring Church
and his band playing in an empty school house intercut with footage of a
kid learning how to play guitar. This is the track on the record where
Church shouts out Elvis Costello and Ray Wylie Hubbard, and calls Jeff
Tweedy “one bad mother.”
The artwork for Oscar’s indie-pop bop “Breaking My Phone”
features a shattered iPhone, but the singer went the retro-futuristic
route in the video for the track, choosing to show exclusively flip
phones as he walks through an East London street. Obviously this was
shot before it came out, but look at Adele’s flip phone impact, stretching back to before it was even released. Check out the video below.
It’s been a particularly great year for queer musicians — PWR BTTM, Adult Mom, and G.L.O.S.S.
chiefly among them, though they’re certainly not the only ones — and
Scottish four-piece the Spook School are throwing their hats into the
ring with Try To Be Hopeful, the follow-up to their very good and very underrated 2013 debut Dress Up.
The record’s already been released on their side of the pond, but it’s
coming stateside at the end of the month, and they’re sharing a
endearingly goofy video for “I Want To Kiss You” to hype it up. Unlike
the explicitly political and passionate first two singles from the album
— “Burn Masculinity” and “Binary”
— “I Wanna Kiss You” is an infatuation anthem, just as passionate as
the band always is, but directing that energy at another person. There’s
still some hints at the fluidity that make them such a welcome presence
in the scene (“I want to hear you say you’ve never done this before
with someone like me,” “But if your god is valid, why isn’t mine?”), but
it takes a backseat to all the breathlessness, anticipation, and desire
that comes with a crush.
Roger Sellers adopted the name Bayonne after press in his hometown of
Austin kept referring to him as a DJ. Bayonne is not a DJ — he’s a
multi-instrumentalist with a soft, delicate sound like Youth Lagoon or
Washed Out. Today, we premiere the music video for Bayonne’s song
“Spectrolite” from his upcoming Mom+Pop debut. According to Sellers, the
song is about a stone that his girlfriend at the time brought him back
from Australia. The travel theme is made evident in the music video;
directed by Lauren Gregory, it’s a tale of traveling in a stop-motion
style with illustrations that come to life, including images of Alvin And The Chipmunks on the airplane screen (timely!) and waking up to a flight attendant hovering over you.
We’ve been waiting a long time for Chromatics to give us Dear Tommy,
their latest much-anticipated klonopin-disco odyssey, and it’s still
set to arrive sometime in the indistinct and hopefully-near future. But
the group has steadily been cranking out entrancing new songs: “Just Like You,” “I Can Never Be Myself When You’re Around,” “In Films,” “Shadow.” And over the summer, in a MANGO commercial, we heard a bit of the group’s cover of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,”
the pop classic that Cyndi Lauper made famous in 1983. As it turns out,
the group are planning to release a massive digital single with seven
different versions of that song, and it’s coming out tomorrow. They’ve
made videos for two of those versions: “Girls Just Wanna Have Some,”
which turns the original song into a dazed and icy twinkle, and “Girls
Just Wanna Have Dub,” which removes all the drums from that dazed and
icy twinkle and turns it into even more of a dreamy fantasia. Both
versions have videos of Chromatics singer Ruth Radelet drifting through a
seaside carnival. They are lovely, even if neither one boasts a
wrestler cameo.
Mind Enterprises is the one-man project of Andrea Tirone, who dabbles
in funky rhythms and groovy pulses in his latest track, “Chapita.” The
Italian musician’s vein of upbeat electro is stylized in the video, an
aesthetically-pleasing venture into funhouse mirrors and bright primary
colors. Directed by the Fashtons (the husband and wife team that is
artist Ben Ashton and photographer/director Fiona Garden), the whole
clip looks like a performance art piece in tangent with the song, as
quirky and bubbly as the music itself.
Kylesa released their latest onslaught, Exhausting Fire, last month, and today the Savannah crew have shared a video for early single “Lost And Confused.”
The band themselves are featured in brief, gloomily-lit interstitials,
but the main thrust here is the complicated relationship between a
destructive and hardcore Bonnie & Clyde pairing, played by Michael
Ferrera and Lydia Schneider. The two of them beat someone up in a
parking lot, rob a pizza place, and have a ton of sex. That last one
comes back to bite them, though, and the female half of the relationship
finds out she’s pregnant. The whole story is presented in fractured
narrative form, so take a few views to process it all below.
After a short break following the release of his sophomore album, Mercy,
earlier this year, Active Child is back with videos for “Midnight Swim”
and “Darling,” two tracks from the LP. Both of them star Aliana Lohan —
yes, of that Lohan clan — and were captured in a single shot
by directing crew TS&R, mostly by the beach. Here’s Active Child’s
Pat Grossi on the intent behind the pair of videos:
I knew I wanted something simple and pure to fit the
placid tone of ‘Darling.’ And once we started shooting the single take
of Ali at sunset I knew it was going to be unlike any other video I’ve
done or seen really. I love the way it stops time.
And here are the directors:
While it may it be possible to fall in love with a
portrait, moving and still, the heartbreak is that we are always kept at
a distance from this romance. The intimacy and closeness we are able to
experience is always untouchable. In front of the glass door of a
picture frame or the canvas of a painting, we are only allowed to look.
We cannot smell the sea, or feel the wind but still we are there. When
asked to spend 4½ mins lost in a stare, the connection to our subject
and backdrop grows. The mystery and curiosity begs us to know more and
wait for change, if any at all.
You can only watch both videos back to back on Active Child’s website — go here to do so.
