The DIY polyglot pop producer Pictureplane released his “Hyper Real”
single last month, and its new video is a good one. The clip documents
one hell of a house party — the type that involves mysterious energy
drinks, random hookups, enormous goths, face-tatted miscreants, neon
vomit, and an absolutely great surprise ending. Jesus Rivera directed it
and did a pretty amazing job of it.
The most important Radiohead video is probably this clip, of the band playing “Creep” at the MTV Beach House in 1993. That’s the video that showed what the band could’ve easily been: A one-hit wonder playing for disinterested frat boys and beach bunnies, looking uncomfortable and humiliated while knocking out their one perfect diamond of a pop song in the worst possible location. Instead, Radiohead became a generation-defining band by challenging expectations at every turn, building an elliptical and challenging body of work along the way. Their videos were a big part of that. Radiohead were making music videos for the internet for years before YouTube was a thing, and while they aren’t all good — there are plenty of half-baked CGI experiments in their video oeuvre — they’re all interesting. We picked the 10 best, and we count them down below. (Note: “Rabbit In Your Headlights” isn’t a Radiohead video, so it isn’t on this list. It would be top three, easy, though.)
10. “Nude” (2008, Dir. Adam Buxton & Garth Jennings)
A thought experiment in all the ways you can make a group of people look creepy and alien through simple use of slow motion. The screwed-and-chopped version of Thom Yorke’s jitter-dance is a hypnotic thing.
9. “Pop Is Dead” (1993, Dir. Dwight Clarke)
“Creep” might be the iconic moment that introduced this band to an international audience, but its video is a straight Nirvana bite, as are the band’s other circa-Pablo Honey videos (except “Stop Whispering,” which looks like a Verve Pipe video). “Pop Is Dead” is the only one that holds up, mostly because of how much Yorke visibly enjoys playing a dandified vampire in a glass coffin. Bonus points for being the first Radiohead video that didn’t try to hide Phil Selways’ baldness.
8. “Go To Sleep” (2003, Dir. Alex Rutterford)
The disquieting all-CGI version of the “Just” video, with catastrophic destruction standing in for an unheard cosmic joke. A polygonal Yorke looks on as the workaday world crumbles and then builds itself back up.
7. “Paranoid Android” (1997, Dir. Magnus Carlsson)
The endless, nonsensical NSFW animated odyssey that more or less invented the deeply randomized Adult Swim aesthetic.
6. “No Surprises” (1997, Dir. Grant Gee)
Visually static and not entirely unboring, but the image of Yorke gasping for breath after letting water submerge his whole head in his space helmet is an iconic one. Also: Possibly the first lyric video ever made?
5. “There, There” (2003, Dir. Chris Hopewell)
Even before its nightmare ending, this is probably Radiohead’s most dreamlike video, with Yorke moving like a jittery wraith through a stop-motion wonderland that turns out to be more dangerous than he might’ve imagined.
4. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” (1996, Dir. Jonathan Glazer)
Radiohead didn’t do too much work with iconic music-video directors, and when they did team up with Michel Gondry for “Knives Out,” it was an ass-ugly disaster. So their two clips with Glazer, who would go on to direct Sexy Beast and Under The Skin, are rare team-ups with a director who has the same sense of vision that they do. Nothing much happens in the “Street Spirit” video, but its uncanny slo-mo and sumptuous black-and-white make it a weirdly ravishing vision. It’s a crime that I can’t find a hi-res version online.
3. “Karma Police” (1997, Dir. Jonathan Glazer)
The band’s second Glazer collab is a ponderous but intense vision with its own dream-reality logic. Watching it on YouTube feels like a distant echo of the way so many of us experienced it for the first time, catching it while flipping through channels drunk or stoned, late at night. Fun fact: Glazer originally pitched the video to Marilyn Manson, and Manson shot him down.
2. “Lotus Flower” (2011, Dir. Garth Jennings)
Thom Yorke pushes his frantic onstage head-bobbles way, way past their logical conclusion and finds a new kind of internet immortality in the future. It was nearly as great when Yorke went full-on modern dance with it in Atoms For Peace’s “Ingenue” video, but the level of swagger it must’ve taken to pull this off on its own is a hell of a thing to consider.
1. “Just” (1995, Dir. Jamie Thraves)
The mysterious, elliptical story is beautifully told; it’s a rare case where a music video uses subtitles and it doesn’t feel like a lazy shortcut. The expressionistic cinematography is otherworldly and powerful. And the band themselves throw themselves into the act of pretending to play music with a level of commitment and confidence that they haven’t shown before or since.
Stockholm-based producer Ishi released “Push It,”
his appropriately titled collaboration with Pusha T a few weeks ago,
and now follows that up with a video for the song. The cosmic clip is an
assault of burning roses, menacing wolves, ballerinas, and Pusha
reigning supreme over the entire cosmic kingdom, bringing One Thousand And One Arabian Nights
to life by rapping about a snake charmer. Actually, the more I watch
this video, the more likely it seems that some of these images came
straight from the mind of Scheherazade. The clip was directed by Alex
Wessely, who’s previously worked with Rihanna, Drake, and Big Sean.
Accordingly, this video is as cinematic as any pop star’s would be.
Don’t turn it off when the credits start to roll at 3:30, though, or
you’ll miss the 20-second snowy showdown that kicks as an epilogue.
Vision Fortune — the noisy, experimental duo from London — have
shared a video for “Back Crawl II,” a teeth-chattering track off of
their sophomore album, Country Music. It’s a creepy affair,
alternating between shaky, shadowy footage of some trees and X-ray shots
of a tongue lolling about in an open mouth that feels like it could
swallow you whole. Not much goes on, but it sets the mood for the track
really well.
Grimes first linked up with Fun. co-leader Jack Antonoff on “Take It Away,” a 2014 song from Antonoff’s solo side project Bleachers. And now they’ve teamed up once again,
this time for an absolutely dazzling pop song called “Entropy.” It’s a
power-pop tune, more or less, with the same sort of sparkling production
that Antonoff brought to Taylor Swift’s “Out Of The Woods.”
But it’s very much a Grimes song, too, with that otherworldly echoing
reverb all over Claire Boucher’s voice. The song will appear on
tonight’s episode of HBO’s Girls. They’ve shared it a bit
early, which is nice, since it’s also a pretty perfect Sunday-morning
soundtrack.
Last year, the Queens rap bully and frequent Action Bronson
collaborator Meyhem Lauren teamed up with the veteran boom-bap producer
Buckwild for the excellently titled Silk Pyramids album. Lauren directed his own sunny, atmospheric video for “100 MPH,” a
warm shit-talk session that features Bronson. In the video, we see
Lauren and Bronson doing pushups and grilling lobsters, looking
absolutely happy to be hanging out together. It’s the kind of rap video
where it seems like a cameraman really just tagged along on a really fun
afternoon.
Devonté Hynes and Neneh Cherry were commissioned by Selfridges — a
high-end UK department store — to write a new song called “He, She, Me”
to soundtrack an original film that was directed by Alex Turvey and
Kathryn Ferguson. “The film is an evolving journey through a subtle push
and pull between masculinity and femininity, captured entirely in one
unbroken shot, utilising in-camera camera effects in a world populated
by out-scaled physical props inspired by Faye Toogood’s in store
realisation of Agender,” the directors explained in a press release.
“This film has come at a time when important conversations about gender
fluidity and non-binary ways of being are finally getting a lot of
attention.”
Directed and edited by Tom Kirk and Simon Bennett
Produced by Banoffee Sky
Post Production: Clare Julia
Artwork illustration and animation by Matt Mahurin
Director of Photography: Matt Hayslett
SEKDEK creator: Brice Frillici
SEKDEK Producer: Lee Sayer
Ever-prolific noise-gauze purveyors Deerhoof released their 12th full-length album, La Isla Bonita (Stream),
late last year and have continued to release accompanying visuals for
various tracks from that record. In January we got Satomi Matsuzak
strolling around the British shoreline in the “Black Pitch”
video, but the animated visuals for “Tiny Bubbles” that came out today
reach a much deeper emotional level for the band. At least for drummer
Greg Saunier, who spoke at length with Mashable about the video, and how
the animator connected to his vision of the song in an uncanny way:
It was a friend of Joyful Noise that got in touch with
them and said he wanted to make a video, and the role that I played in
this video was not to say no. I did not prevent this friend of Joyful
Noise from making the video — I didn’t have any idea what it would be. I
didn’t know the person — I still don’t. Never met them. So when this
animated video arrived suddenly one day in my inbox and I watched this
thing, I feel that the animator has not only understood the song and the
words, but to a level that felt uncanny — you know sometimes you have
that feeling where it’s like you meet someone and you’ve known them your
whole life. And this kinda felt like that — like he seemed to nail the
ethos of what we wanted to do with that song and with the whole record
to such a T that it was like — sometimes it’s like an out-of-body
experience.
If that’s not a good reason to watch a video, I don’t know what is. Although Saunier wasn’t sure of the creator, Geoff Hoskinson directed and animated the poignant, capitalism-condemning clip.
As TCTS, Manchester producer Sam O’Neill makes the kind of itchy,
irresistible house that American audiences most readily identify with
Disclosure. Like the Lawrence brothers, he’s also eager to pair his
skill as a producer with soulful, emerging singers such as Sam Sure or his recent Jessie Ware
remix. The same goes for his new single “Thinking About You,” which
features Leo Kalyan with some seriously lush vocals. Today we’re
premiering the WVLFCVB-directed
video for the track. It follows an unsuspecting, apathetic factory
worker through the discovery of a hidden labyrinth of experiments and
underworlds all happening right under his nose. From a green-lipsticked
jungle dominatrix to medical experiments with cloning and even spooky
mannequins, the visuals ape the way music can open up whole new worlds
for us in already-familiar territory.
Björk is one of the great music-video artists of all time, and she’s
just shared her clip for the devastating “Lionsong,” from her
bottomlessly sad new album Vulnicura. Her longtime collaborators Inez & Vinoodh directed the video, and it features Björk wearing the human-dandelion outfit from the Vulnicura
cover art, her heart visibly beating out of her chest. Here’s how the
directors describe the video: “Björk’s character for ‘Lionsong’ had to
be smooth like a spider waiting in her web and seductive like a Balinese
dancer cast in bronze. She is seen as if under a microscope, baring her
heart while luring us inside the bloody galaxy of her own wound.” While
you have to go to Björk’s MoMA exhibit to see her 3D video for album centerpiece “Black Lake,” this one is up online for all of us.
A mashup of 'Dinosaurs' (TV Series 1991–1994) and Hypnotize by The Notorious B.I.G (1997).
Remixed and released by @benjaminrrrrr under the doctrine of fair use.
For months, we’ve been hearing about HBO’s forthcoming Kurt Cobain documentary Montage Of Heck,
which his daughter Frances Bean Cobain executive produced. It’ll be the
first-ever authorized Cobain doc, and it’ll include unreleased tracks
like a Beatles cover and a 12-minute acoustic song.
And today, we get to see our first glimpse of the finished product. The
new trailer for the documentary just appeared online, and it includes
talking-head interviews with Courtney Love and Krist Novoselic, footage
of Cobain of a child, and — I’m not too sure about this part — a whole
lot of animation. I got chills twice; your mileage may vary.
When “My Jam”
first dropped, not only did I laud it as the next inescapable song of
the summer, I also fervently wished it would get a dance-ready, colorful
video. My wish has been granted. Bobby Brackins, Zendaya, and Jeremih
all cleared their schedules, hopped a flight to Puerto Rico, and
captured the day-drunk, effervescent feel of the song. The clip is a
cinematic tour through the island’s countryside combined with the
colorful pop-rock magic of their traveling dance party. Most of all,
it’s fun. “My Jam” follows in the long lineage of songs like
“Happy” that can be enjoyed with the same enthusiasm by anyone from nine
to 90. Considering the song’s G-rating and Zendaya’s recent graduation
from the Disney channel crowd, I bet a lot of kids are going to be
dancing along to the video this summer.
The concept of time gracefully underscores Kathryn Calder’s solo
work. The New Pornographer and former Immaculate Machine frontwoman is
working on her kickstarter-funded documentary, A Matter of Time,
about the process of recording her first solo album while caring for
her dying mother. The new video for “Take A Little Time,” from her
eponymous third album is a more lighthearted meditation on temporality —
how it can inspire, terrify, and ultimately heal you. She outruns a
horde of floating, illustrated monsters before finally reaching the
moment of divine inspiration. Watch the video and check out her tour
dates below.
In making her new video for “Wallace,” a track from her 2014 album Broke With Expensive Taste,
Azealia Banks did something different. The video is an interactive
piece of work, one that you help control via webcam. Apparently, the way
you move your face controls the way her face moves, and your face also
shows up behind her from time to time. (That’s me up there. Hi.) Nick Ace and Rob Soucy
directed the video, and it distorts Banks’ face in some compelling and
alien ways. You need the Google Chrome browser for the video to work,
but if you have that, you can watch it here.
Steve Gunn has been quietly climbing out of his role as a backing
guitarist for Kurt Vile and into a marquee role of his own. Today, that
role has been firmly cemented with the announcement that he’s leaving
Paradise Of Bachelors, the independent label with a keen eye for all
things folk, and signing with indie giant Matador Records. For now, he’s
still touring in support of his excellent 2014 release Way Out Weather,
and today shared the video for that album’s “Wildwood.” In the clip,
directed by Dan Murphy, Gunn wanders through the toll bridges,
convenience stores, and wilderness of Wildwood, New Jersey.
Yannick Iluga, the Capetown producer known as Petite Noir, just released his debut EP The King Of Anxiety,
a collection of his slim, joyous, South African bedroom pop. Dubbed
“noirwave,” his songs manage to contain a roiling darkness that’s always
buoyed up by light touches and a frenetic sense of groove. In the newly
released video for “The Fall” you can see these elements in his visual
aesthetic too, as the stark black and white setting constantly shifts
between shadow and light. Ilunga co-directed the video with Rochelle
Nembhard and cited Marina Abramovic as an inspiration:
The video is inspired by the work of Serbian artist
Marina Abramovic, and in particular her ‘The Artist is Present’
performance art piece (MoMa 2010), where she was reunited with her
ex-lover, the German artist Ulay, after 22 years apart. It’s intended as
a raw and transparent look into what we do to each other in
relationships, setting aside the fakeness and pretense that we shroud
ourselves in.
Iluga is currently working on his first full-length album, which
should be out later this year. For now, watch his new video.
