Matteah Baim - “Peach Tree” (Official Video)

One of last year’s most lovely (and most regrettably slept-on) releases was Matteah Baim’s Falling Theater, an album of quietly beautiful folk music featuring collaborations from the likes of Antony Hegarty and MGMT’s James Richardson. For those who aren’t familiar, Baim is an artist who has been releasing gorgeous and occasionally inscrutable records for years now (both as a solo artist and as a member of Metallic Falcons) and has performed and collaborated with everyone from Perfume Genius to Devendra Banhart to Lower Dens to Liturgy to Vashti Bunyan. This week sees the release of a companion video for “Peach Tree,” one of Falling Theater‘s most stunning tracks. Directed by renowned filmmaker Jonathan Caouette (the mad genius responsible for the acclaimed autobiographical documentary Tarnation as well as last year’s mind-bending docu-video for John Grant’s “Glacier”), the clip features footage of Caouette’s own mother having an ambiguously transcendent experience at a cabin tucked away in the woods, which proves to be an inspired pairing for a song that is an almost haiku-like meditation on stillness. Caouette shared a statement about the collaboration:

Matteah’s solo work never fails to move me emotionally. It’s unpredictable and unfailingly moving in all the greatest ways that good music can/should be. I reached into my archive of footage recently and dipped into some outtakes from an experimental film I had been working on a while ago, and repurposed it to marry aspects of it into Matteah’s beautiful, astral song, “Peach Tree.” I am not certain what the actual backstory of the song is, lyrically, but I immediately was able to personalize with the music and lyrics. I used some footage of my dear mom, who has suffered from a severe mental illness most of her life.

Squarepusher - “Stor Eiglass” Virtual Reality Video

During his late-’90s heyday, the experimental dance music whiz kid Squarepusher was responsible for some truly boundary-crushing music videos. So it only makes sense that Squarepusher would try his hand at the whole interactive-video wave happening now. For “Stor Eiglass,” a track from his new album Damogen Furies, Squarepusher has gotten together with Marshmallow Laser Feast, Rob Pybus, and Blue Zoo to develop a whole candy-colored virtual-reality universe. And even if you watch the standard YouTube version of the video, you can use YouTube’s 360 function to pan around the environments. For the virtual-reality headset version of the clip, head over here, or play around with the YouTube version below.

Fraser A. Gorman - “Shiny Gun” Video (Feat. Courtney Barnett)

Aussie singer-songwriter Fraser A. Gorman makes a deceptively American style of alternative country/folk. He even admits to being slightly out of sorts on his previous single “Broken Hands,” singing, “I got no soul/’Cause country music sounds to me like rock ‘n’ roll.” Gorman’s latest offering is a video for “Shiny Gun” off his forthcoming album Slow Gum. Directed by Sunny Leunig, the clip is a fine piece of throwback work that Ron Burgundy would be proud of. His friend and label head Courtney Barnett assists as the sports correspondent on a fun ’70s-style news broadcast turned jam session. If only local news was this entertaining.

Vince Staples - “Señorita” (Official Video)

Last week, the young Long Beach rap insurgent Vince Staples shared “Señorita,” the first single from his official debut album Summertime ’06. With its sweeping production and its Future hook, the song initially sounded like Staples’ attempt to reach the marketplace. But the song’s brand-new video tells a different story. It’s a vivid, apocalyptic black-and-white vision about a ghetto full of poor black and Latino and white people gunned down randomly, living squalid lives and looking for meaning. There’s a Twilight Zone-level reveal at the end. This is a striking, powerful piece of work, the kind of thing that gives the song a whole new context. Ian Pons Jewell directed the video.

Spoon - “Inside Out” (Official Video)

Last month, They Want My Soul single “Inside Out” got a whole EP worth of remixes, and now Spoon has shared a video for the track. Britt Daniel plays the passive observer during a bunch of retro set pieces, as though he’s slipped out of time himself. There are banquet hall fights, old-school recording studios, and a robbery getaway, all shot with a sweeping, soft lens. The video was directed by duo Leblanc + Cudmore, who also recently shot videos for Belle & Sebastian, the New Pornographers, and alt-J.

Watch A New Trailer For Kurt Cobain Conspiracy Theory Docudrama Soaked In Bleach

This year is an embarrassment of riches if you’re really into documentaries about Kurt Cobain. First we had Kurt Cobain: Montage Of Heck, which was a legitimately very good documentary that painted a complicated and unsympathetic portrait of one of our most enduring rockstars. The other is Soaked In Bleach, a borderline offensive and unbelievably cheesy-looking “docudrama” that combines a few interviews with reenactments that explore the kooky theory of whether or not Courtney Love staged her husband’s suicide. We saw one trailer last year, and now here’s another one — it looks stupid, but also maybe worth a hatewatch.

Angelic Milk - “IDK How” (Official Video)

Angelic Milk is the project of 17-year-old Russian punk Sarah Persephona, who wowed last month with “IDK How,” her deceptively deep and immensely replayable new single. The track now has a video to go along with it, and it provides just as much insight into the younger singer’s mind as her songs do. It’s a mish-mash of sparkling pink retro backdrops and dirty urban landscapes; digital decay fills the screen like someone just copied-and-pasted some of their favorite GIFs from around the web. It’s an entertaining funhouse that Persephona floats through, buoyed by a song that makes you want to jump along with it.

Major Lazer - “2 Cups” (Feat. Riff Raff) Video

Major Lazer have a new album called Peace Is The Mission coming out, but to promote their new FXX cartoon, they’re also cranking out non-album tracks these days. Most recently, we saw their video for the Andy Samberg collab “Bass Drop.” And now they’re teaming up with the Mad Decent rap clown Riff Raff for “2 Cups,” a song about consuming dangerous amounts of codeine cough syrup. The track’s new video, from animator Jeremy Sengly, is basically a lyric video, though it does feature a Skeletor-looking cartoon version of Riff Raff.

José González - “Open Book” (Official Video)

Last month, the Swedish-Argentine singer-songwriter José González starred in Calexico’s video for “Falling From The Sky,” alongside a truly disturbing and disgusting misshapen worm-creature puppet. Well, that nasty-ass worm is back again, this time in one of González’s own videos. In this one, González checks into a hotel to spend some quality time with his creature. The video feels deeply peaceful, making for a sharp contrast from all the Cronenbergian body horror on display. “Falling From The Sky” director Mikel Cee Karlsson helmed this one, as well.

Fred Thomas - “Cops Don’t Care Pt. II” (Official Video)

Fred Thomas is the kind of songwriter who reorders your universe if you hear his music at the right moment, and for me, that moment arrived last night at the Brooklyn DIY venue Palisades. Watching Thomas perform completely alone to a small but silent audience felt bone-stripping, making each one of his tongue-in-cheek references cut twice as deep. Though Thomas’ songs narrate inane intricacies of daily life at breakneck speed, the small situations he conjures often speak to more universal feelings of unease. “Cops Don’t Care Pt. II,” from Thomas’ new All Are Saved, is a heavy, contempt-fueled discussion of power dynamics. It conveys a sentiment rather than a straightforward message, small pieces of passing scenery jutting out like misplaced limbs. “Life is so incredibly long, like a kiss on a bridge between two nervous-ass kids, terrified of doing everything wrong/ Fickle, belligerent, fully-existent.” When Thomas played this track last night, the room was so quiet that it felt frigid, despite the fact that the A/C wasn’t on and everyone in the surrounding crowd was so sweaty that we, as a collective, smelled rank. In less than two minutes, “Cops Don’t Care Pt. II” breaks your heart and puts it back together again with its defiant and declarative conclusion, “Nobody’s safe from the law because they don’t give a fuck/ They don’t give a fuck about us.” All of Thomas’ songs are intimate and earnest, with any hint at self-reverence dampened by his acerbic delivery, and this new video for “Cops Don’t Care Pt. II” perfectly illustrates his dichotomous persona. Joel Rakowski directs.

Main Attrakionz - “Ain’t No Other Way” Video (Dir. Kreayshawn)

Bay Area duo Main Attrakionz helped pioneer the murky, drifting, emotive rap style that made A$AP Rocky famous, but they’ve been missing in action for a few years. Next month, they’ll return with their new album 808s & Dark Grapes 3, produced entirely by Friendzone. Kreayshawn got her start directing videos for Bay Area underground rappers before getting famous with “Gucci Gucci,” and she handles the clip for the twinkling 808s & Dark Grapes 3 single “Ain’t No Other Way.” In the clip, Main Attrakionz and Friendzone amble through San Francisco’s Chinatown, and Kreayshawn makes lovely use of neon light whenever possible.

Rae Sremmurd - “This Could Be Us” (Official Video)

Mississippi duo Rae Sremmurd have already scored three monster hits — “No Flex Zone,” “No Type,” “Throw Sum Mo” — all from their ridiculously fun debut album SremmLife. In the annals of swag-rap history, that’s pretty much an unprecedented feat. And they could have a third on their hands, now that they’ve released “This Could Be Us” as a single. The Twitter meme that inspired the song is beyond dead, but the song itself is still absurdly catchy, and now its got a fun video. In the new clip, both members of Rae Sremmurd get dumped long-distance via Skype, but neither of them seems too bothered by it. Both of them, after all, are in South Africa, petting cheetahs and playing spin the bottle. Max & Michael Illiams direct.

Marilyn Manson - “The Mephistopheles Of Los Angeles” (Official Video)

Marilyn Manson might still be the music industry’s most prominent exhibitionist, having managed to maintain his branded, performative facade for over 20 years. Manson is still riding on the same shock-goth sensibility that he introduced way back in 1994, when Portrait Of An American Family dropped and Manson made himself known as a force to be reckoned with, or at least, someone to be scared of. “The Mephistopheles Of Los Angeles” is a track off of Manson’s latest offering, The Pale Emperor, and the video for the song shows the singer evangelizing his demonic ways amidst a gloomy, black and white warehouse district in L.A. The song and storyline alludes to Mephistopheles, a satanic, Germanic demon who first appeared in a Faustian legend. Directed by Francesco Carrozzini, this video is a creepy homage to cult icons.

Raekwon - “1,2 1,2″ (Feat. Snoop Dogg) Video

Raekwon’s new album Fly International Luxurious Art came and went without a whole lot of notice last month. But that album had some joints on it, and one of those joints was “1,2 1,2,” on which Rae and Snoop Dogg teamed up for bring a surprising level of old-rap-dude energy. Those two have styles that should clash horribly, but they meshed beautifully and seemed to really enjoy being on a song together. The new video for “1,2 1,2″ has some of that same energy working for it. It’s one of those rapping-against-a-white-background videos, but it keeps things energetic, and it showcases the charisma of a couple of honest-to-god stars. Dame Dash cameos and does the Dame Dash dance, which I didn’t even know was possible without champagne bottles in both hands.

Röyksopp - “I Had This Thing” (Official Video)

Norwegian electronic duo Röyksopp had a momentous 2014, reaching chart peaks and earning a Grammy nomination for Do It Again, the mini-album they recorded alongside Robyn. They also released their fifth and final full-length studio album, The Inevitable End, to both critical and commercial success. Now they’ve put out a video for the album’s single “I Had This Thing,” which features a cooing, vulnerable vocal from Inevitable End collaborator Jamie Irrepressible. Director Roboshobo’s footage follows the confusion and heartache of a young couple, whose hang-ups get overshadowed by what can only be described as a cross between a UFO sighting and a volcanic eruption. Much like the song, the video inhabits the most painful intimacies of love, then explodes them into a wash of warm color.

Tanlines - “Pieces” (Official Video)

Tanlines have been poking fun at the whole idea of an album rollout as they prepare to release their second album Highlights. Maybe when something as absurd as your hard drive blowing up happens, this whole process loses its edge of seriousness. So, they turned their website into a Netflix parody, streamed the whole project via a conference call, and today, premiered the video for “Pieces” on FunnyorDie.com. Even if it’s a bit of a spoof, the video is a really cute story of Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm playing basketball, driving through Venice Beach and Santa Monica in a convertible, and meeting some cute girls. In the end, they face off against another duo on the basketball court, who beat them rather handily. But that doesn’t even matter, because they can still drive around a beach town, singing along to their own song, hands out the window in a convertible.

Chastity Belt - “Joke” (Official Video)

It’s always cool to see how a band operates during their downtime in a tour video, like the one Chastity Belt put together for their Time To Go Home track “Joke.” They are seem like loads of fun, like the kind of people you wouldn’t mind having to be stuck in a van with for weeks at a time. The mellow vibe of “Joke” matches the mood of the video, which alternates between shots of them drinking, walking around the cities they visited and, of course, a lot of sitting in the car.

Courtney Barnett - “Dead Fox” (Official Video)

“Dead Fox” is the environmental anthem that comes during the middle of Courtney Barnett’s great debut full-length. As all Barnett’s songs are, it’s about much more than what’s on the surface, but it is the most overtly political song on the record, and now it’s got an animated video that depicts some of the injustices the song points out. Kangaroo carcasses litter the shoulder of a road, cute animals drive cars and participate in the very industry that is slow eviscerating them. Barnett stands as the detached observer in all of this, complicit and conflicted. The video was directed and animated by Rory Kerr and Paul Ruttledge.