The Smith Westerns – “Varsity”

Chicago glam rockers the Smith Westerns return next month with their new album Soft Will, and their new video for the shimmering lead single “Varsity” is full of close-up shots of things that scream springtime: juicy grapefruits, flowers blowing in wind, loft-elevator makeout sessions. There’s a gorgeous rooftop sunset scene in there, too. Alan Del Rio Ortiz directs, filling everything with dreamy washes of light. 

David Bowie – “The Next Day” Video Starring Gary Oldman and Marion Cotillard

Update: As Billboard points out, the video has been removed from YouTube "because its content violated YouTube's Terms of Service". It can still be watched below via Vevo.

For his third video from The Next Day, David Bowie is keeping things cinematic and strange. Obviously. Here once more is Floria Sigismundi, again directing A-list movie stars (last time Tilda Swinton, this time Marion Cotillard and Gary Oldman) in a typical tale of the church, a brothel, and a stigmata-afflicted prostitute. It’s an idea “written and conceived” by David Himself, and the second time Bowie and Oldman have collaborated (see also: 1995′s Reeves Gabrels album The Sacred Squall of Now, and the next year’s film Basquiat).

Ok, here again:

Northern Bells – “Animal Kingdom” Video

Eric Power has been quietly making a name for himself as a music video director with his unique paper cutout animations. The process seems sort of similar to how early South Park episodes were made — except while Matt Stone and Trey Parker often revel in the cheapness of their medium, Power’s lavish animations are devastatingly beautiful and creepily atmospheric. The new video for Northern Bells’ “Animal Kingdom” depicts the journey of three different monsters and their shared fate. Bringing to mind influences as disparate as Eric Carle’s children’s books and the suffocating darkness of the video game Limbo, Power has created something very distinct and poignant.

The Lonely Island – “Spring Break Anthem” Video (Feat. Zach Galifianakis & James Franco)

Free Time – “I Lost Again”

Free Time, a quartet who moved from Melbourne to New York, play jangly and fuzzy old-school indie-pop, and they’ve got a self-titled debut album coming out later this month. In the video for their song “I Lost Again,” the members of the band casually wander into a warehouse-space elevator and begin playing their song together, acting like this is a perfectly normal thing for people to be doing. Charles Poekel directs the remarkably pleasant clip.

PVT – “Homosapien”

The picture above just can’t convey the simple coolness of PVT’s new video for the title track of last year’s album, Homosapien. Imagine the brilliant re-edit of The Antlers they did recently, now picture them doing something similar to their own music video. Director Clemens Habicht’s video would be nice enough, with its stark black and white, but he then alters and edits the framerate with surgical precision. The effect, much like the fantastic song, makes the video shift between jerkiness and smoothness, with quick movements (both aural and visual in this case) that hit you almost subliminally.

Shellshag – “Driving Song”

In their video for “Forever,” we saw the long-running DIY punk duo Shellshag assembling their singular onstage rig-up at time-lapse speeds. Their new video for the warm and fuzzy “Driving Song” is, in its own way, just as low-tech and charming, thanks to the adorably terrible greenscreen effects that put John Shell and Jen Shag and their friends into a model-train universe. In the clip, Shell and Shag play wily hobo crooks on the run from the authorities. Corey Tatarczuk and David Hale direct.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs – “Mosquito” Video

The video for “Sacrifice,” the first single from the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album Mosquito, was a pretty great widescreen event-video sort of thing, deeply satisfying on an old-school MTV-ready level. But the band decided to go weird on the album’s second video, for the title track. The whole clip focuses on a CGI mosquito landing on a kid’s hand and drinking his blood. It’s not quite as terrifying as the bug on the album’s godawful cover art, but it’s still pretty nightmarish, and it gets more so as the video gets progressively more psychedelic. If you can make it through the whole video without clicking on another tab, you are a stronger person than me. B. Shimbe Shim directs.

Biffy Clyro – “Different People” Live In London

Laura Marling – “Master Hunter” (Video)

Singer-songwriter Laura Marling has already released some really lovely songs in anticipation of her new album Once I Was An Eagle, but something is very … off (in a good way) in her video for recent single, “Master Hunter.” Marling plays to a dimly lit scene of a couple dancing and struggling that is either sensually violent or violently sensual, with jerky movements that suggest J-horror as much as a sex scene. It’s a beautifully dark video, and (like a lot of great music videos) puts the song in a context that’s hard to forget. It’s worth noting that Marling adds a new coda to the song, a brief pulse of dissonance that perfectly complements the unsettling final twist of the video. Marling has been shining all year, and this video just adds another facet.

Queens Of The Stone Age – “I Appear Missing” Video

UK artist Bonaface animated Queens of the Stone Age's post-apocalyptic, wasteland-set "I Appear Missing" music video. It's quite intense.

Team Spirit – “MRDR It’s Ok” (Official Video)

The last time Team Spirit, the new party-riff band led by former Passion Pit member Ayad Al Adhamy, released a video, it was for “Jesus, He’s Alright.” It was a live-action thing about drunken debauchery in a church, but it ended with the members of the band becoming animated characters and being sent into hell’s deepest depths. Their latest video, for “MRDR It’s Ok,” starts out where that one left off, with Satan forcibly conscripting the band into duty as his wedding band before the band’s members take matters into their own hands. The vision of hell, from the Swedish animation duo HannesJohannes, is a vivid, cartoonishly gruesome, vaguely NSFW thing. Whatever happens in the rest of Team Spirit’s career, they can tell their grandkids that their animated avatars used guitars to decapitate demons.

The Flaming Lips – “You Lust” (NSFW)

“You Lust” is the pounding 13-minute drone-groove at the heart of the Flaming Lips new album The Terror, and its video cuts the song down to a more manageable four minutes. It does not, however, do anything else to make the song more digestible. In the clip, we see a naked man and a naked woman lying in the middle of a room, their body parts hooked up to freaky electrodes, while three more naked women do experiments on them and frogs and monkeys crawl around them. You know, normal stuff. Please be advised that the nudity is an extra-visceral type of nudity. If you feel like you’re ready.

Is Tropical - "Dancing Anymore" (NSFW)

A word of warning: if you’re not fantastically keen on imagery of a pornographic nature then don’t watch this video. Or if you’re in a workplace with other people that aren’t necessarily as broadminded as yourself, then you should take the NSFW label seriously…

But for everyone else – well, go ahead and enjoy Megaforce’s video for Is Tropical’s Dancing Anymore – which, although it contains explicit and relentless sexual imagery, is not actually pornography. Not really.

It is, of course, the follow-up to the French directing team’s sensational, hugely successful video for Is Tropical’s The Greeks, and it is very much its conceptual sequel. And it shares a good deal of The Greeks’ genius too. It’s just that instead of cartoon violence from the imaginations of small boys playing Nerf gun wargames, we are confronted with the contents of an male adolescent’s brain, at the point when he has the opportunity for some serious masturbation action…

Dancing Anymore is the first single from Is Tropical's upcoming album "I'm Leaving"

Video directed by MEGAFORCE
Produced by : Kitsuné and Iconoclast
Production Company: Iconoclast.tv
Head of CGi : Yann Aldabe, Jehan Bouazza

Kurt Vile - "Never Run Away"

Kurt Vile’s wonderful new album Waking On A Pretty Daze, one of the year’s best, is a languorous sprawl, and you wouldn’t expect it to lend itself to elegant graphic design or stark iconography. But in making the proper video for Vile’s song “Never Run Away”, the great directing team HARRYS dressed Vile in an all-white ensemble and filmed him in 35mm. We see Vile playing a white guitar and riding an all-white school bus, slouching his way around the more desolate reaches of his native Philadelphia. It’s a weirdly perfect video.

Bibio – “À Tout À L’Heure”

The British producer Bibio has said that he recorded “À Tout À L’Heure,” the hazily psychedelic first single from his new album Silver Wilkinson, while he was outside in his yard on a sunny day, using things like garden shears and watering cans as instruments. And now he’s linked up with Russell Weekes to co-direct the song’s video himself, using ancient 8mm stock footage and slow-rotating silhouettes to make a pleasantly druggy visual, something that looks like it could’ve been projected on a wall at a late-’60s nightclub.

Austra – “Home” (Official Video)

A few years ago, the operatic Toronto art-punk veteran Katie Stelmanis put together the witchy synthpop band Austra, and their excellent debut album Feel It Break was one of the great surprises of 2011. Next month, they’ll follow it up with the sophomore effort Olymbia, and they’ve already shared the floridly gorgeous first single “Home.” Now they’ve linked with the directorial duo that go to make a video for the song. The clip consists of a single steady shot of a depressed-looking Stelmanis, sitting numbly while other Austra members flit around her.

Janelle Monáe – “Q.U.E.E.N.” Video (Feat. Erykah Badu)

Whoo! Last month, Janelle Monáe released her Erykah Badu-assisted single “Q.U.E.E.N.,” an irresistible art-funk strut. And today, we get the sort of video that makes an already-great song even better. The new “Q.U.E.E.N.” video is a triumph of vicious charisma and graphic design, starring Monáe and Badu as thawed-out rebels who throw a dance-party in a futuristic museum. And it is so good. Monáe debuts an absolutely deadly early-’60s mod mook, her friends get to show off some crispy dance steps, and Badu gets a perfectly badass entrance. If I don’t get any more work done today, it’s because I’m watching this over and over. Directed by Alan Ferguson