Chromatics - “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” (Cyndi Lauper Cover)

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 - “Chapita” (Official Video)

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 - “Lost And Confused” (Official Video)

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.

Active Child - “Midnight Swim” & “Darling” (Official Video)

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.

Banks - “Better” (Official Video)

On Goddess, Jillian Rose Banks’ debut album from last year, she went all-in on dark melodramatic pop, and her new single “Better” is very much in the same vein. Centered around Banks’ always powerful pipes, it’s another sinister minimalist synth track built around a vague threat and promise: “I could love you better than she can.” It’s paired with some visuals that borrow a page from the Arca physicality textbook, featuring Banks dressed in gold foil and a naked body arching up and down. This single’s being released to promote her upcoming tour with the Weeknd, but a new album is expected out next year.

Sun Club - “Worm City” (Official Video)

Baltimore’s psychedelic five-piece Sun Club just released their ATO debut, The Dongo Durango, and “Worm City” is one of its singles that we premiered several weeks back. The song’s accompanying video finds the band goofing off in front of a green screen with the same wild-eyed, enthusiastic presence they share with an audience during a live performance. This is a meta, video within a video directed by Robby Rackleff, and Sun Club’s drummer Devin McCord told The 405 the following about the clip’s central concept:

We wanted to just make a crazy overstimulating green screen video and Robby (Baltimore director) who we asked to film the video has done a bunch of awesome and ridiculous stuff for Adult Swim. He used to film old funny Wham City videos and we’ve seen his standup too – so when our real good bud Max said he was his cousin we reached out and asked him to film Worm City in Shane’s old living space. We just spent one day getting real weird in front of the green screen in this warehouse place and this is the product.

Muse - "Revolt" (Official Video)

Muse - "Revolt" (Official Video)

Really excited to share this massive video we shot in Prague for our latest single “Revolt”. We wanted the video in black and white only using color to represent revolution. Directed by Guy Shelmerdine

Carly Rae Jepsen - “Your Type” (Official Video)

Carly Rae Jepsen’s E•MO•TION is, straight-up, the best big, glossy, down-the-middle pop album of 2015, even if its sales don’t reflect that. And “Your Type” is one of its best songs. But where Jepsen could’ve made a big, glossy, down-the-middle video for “Your Type,” she did something more interesting instead: She made a video about the importance of big, glossy, down-the-middle pop visions in people’s everyday lives. In the video, Jepsen plays a woman with a shitty job, living in a depressing town, who sings pop songs at a sad, scuzzy bar to no reaction at all. In her mind, though, she’s a star, and the video flashes back and forth between her vision and her reality. There’s also some narration about how we need imagination in our lives. It’s a great video, and you can check it out below.

Vaarwell - “Perfectly Fine” (Official Video)

Portuguese indie-pop band Vaarwell dabble in stop-motion movie-making techniques in their latest video for “Perfectly Fine,” full of playful visuals and meta media screens. The effervescent track from Vaarwell’s Love And Forgiveness EP plays through cut-out imagery and superimposed shots as dreamy and ethereal as the band’s sound, the band members themselves making appearances as silhouetted figures. “Perfectly Fine” has a buoyant yet melancholy quality to it, like Belle & Sebastian if they recorded for Run For Cover Records. Hugo Rosado directs.

Will Butler - “What I Want” Video (Feat. Jennifer Morrison & Perry Farrell)

“What I Want” is the latest memorable video from Arcade Fire member Will Butler’s solo album Policy. The song is a frantic garage-rocker about anxiously considering whether to settle down together, and director Brantley Gutierrez’s video — featuring a cameo from Perry Farrell — puts a fun sci-fi spin on that concept. Butler and House/Once Upon A Time star Jennifer Morrison play a prim and proper couple who enter a bar full of wild and crazy punk children. After being terrorized and chased out by the youths, Butler and Morrison strike back in a manner that anyone desperately clinging to their youth will find truly horrifying.

Ariana Grande - “Focus” (Official Video)

Ariana Grande had a huge pop-star breakout year last year, but she’s spent most of 2015 turning more of the tracks from her album My Everything into singles and casting aspersions upon donuts and candy corn. The last two months of this year are absolutely jammed with big-name pop records from people like Adele and Justin Bieber, so it’s impressive that Grande is suddenly dropping new music in such a crowded landscape and that she’s come back swinging. Late last night, Grande dropped her new single “Focus,” as well as its video, and it’s a good one. The song is deep and funky, with busy woodblocks-and-cowbells percussion and honking horns that remind me of Amerie and Rich Harrison’s collaborations. (Her 2014 summer jam “Problem” had some of the same elements, but this one hits those notes harder.) It also has a chorus that sounds like Fred Sanford yelling at you. Hannah Lux Davis directed the video, which shows off Grande’s glammy new bleached-hair look and treats her like a Bond girl.

Tinashe - “Player” (Feat. Chris Brown) Video

Last year, Tinashe released her debut LP Aquarius, one of the best R&B albums we’ve heard in years. She’s announced plans to follow it up with a new one called Joyride, and now she’s got a video for “Player,” the fluid, Chris Brown-featuring lead single. The clip is structured as some kind of dance-battle video game, and it mostly exists to show that Tinashe knows how to move. And if you have to use Chris Brown, “dance-battle final boss” is a pretty good way to do it. Watch the video below.

Oneohtrix Point Never - “Sticky Drama” (Official Video)

Next week, Daniel Lopatin will release Garden Of Delete, his latest album as Oneohtrix Point Never. So far, we’ve heard “I Bite Through It” and “Mutant Standard” from the record, and today he’s shared another new one called “Sticky Drama.” The rollout for this one is accompanied by two separate videos making up a short film which was co-directed by Lopatin and Jon Rafman — one’s a prologue and the other is the actual video for the track, but they’re both interconnected. And they’re really cool! Equal parts creepy and fascinating, they play out like a live-action video game, complete with text boxes and maps and aerial shots and everything!

Bloc Party - “The Love Within” (Official Video)

By and large, people do not seem especially pumped about the EDM-influenced direction that Bloc Party are taking on their forthcoming album HYMNS. But it’s hard to argue too much with a video about people dancing. And that’s what we get in the new clip for Bloc Party’s single “The Love Within.” In the clip, a random-ish cast — a little kid, a lady in a business suit, members of Bloc Party, a dog — dance exuberantly and impressively through a mostly-abandoned shopping mall. (Well, the dog doesn’t dance, sadly. It just walks.) There’s also a deeply inexplicable bit involving a lizard. Ivana Bobic directed the video.

Dilly Dally - “The Touch” (Official Video)

We recently named Dilly Dally one of the 50 Best New Bands Of 2015 after the Toronto-based group dropped their excellent new album, Sore, last month. They released hyper-stylized, inventive videos for “Purple Rage” and “Desire,” but the new David Waldman-directed clip for “The Touch” plays it straight, which is perhaps due to the grave nature of the song’s content. Katie Monks addressed the message behind “The Touch”:

I wrote this song for a friend of mine who was having suicidal thoughts. I felt this huge sense of urgency, and wanted to nurture him in anyway I possible could: sexually, emotionally, and then finally realized that I could help him through music. It was all very instinctual. The song attempts to reach him in his dark place, and then lure him away from there. The chorus in this song is very sweet and gentle. It is meant to be comforting and remind him of romance and the softness of a woman’s touch. If that isn’t enough to live for, than I don’t know what is.

David Waldman, a Toronto-based music photographer of over ten years, is who we turned to for the music video. His direction helped us illuminate the DIY punk scene that Dilly Dally has spawned from here in our city. It is a very honest and practical video that shows the band jamming in a dusty basement, and then going on our usual run to the convenient store. The video is also laced with dark, symbolic and ghostly imagery. It is meant to be an empowering piece for women, and inspiring for those who struggle with depression.

Kirin J Callinan - “The Teacher” (Feat. Connan Mockasin) Video

Australian experimentalist Kirin J Callinan was responsible for a lot of great visuals behind his 2013 debut album, Embracism, and it looks like he’s continuing the trend for his follow-up, which is due out next year. Last month, he shared the LP’s lead single, “The Teacher,” and today he gives us a smoothly sliding, very ’80s video for it. The clip features Callinan in a variety of costumes and poses, largely in a floral top against a blue-grid background. He’s joined by his collaborator on the track, fellow down under musician Connan Mockasin, who plays sax and looks seductively at the camera. Check it out via The Fader below.

Pill - “Hot Glue” (Official Video)

Pill impressed us with “Hot Glue,” the A-side to their Mexican Summer debut 7″, enough to make our 5 Best Songs list the week it was released, and today the NYC four-piece has shared a video for the track. It’s filled with pretty standard punk gross-out visuals — long manicured nails laying waste to various soapy phallic foods (did they weigh in as pro- or anti- banana? I can’t tell…), alongside colorful collections of their eponymous namesake.

The Goon Sax - “Sometimes Accidentally” (Official Video)

“No, I don’t care about much/ But I definitely sometimes care about you,” lament Brisbane’s slacker indie-rock trio the Goon Sax in their video for debut track “Sometimes Accidentally.” Just out of high school, the band share in fellow Aussie Courtney Barnett’s storytelling narrative with their witty, self-deprecating lyrics, told in similar sing-talk fashion. “Sometimes Accidentally” takes the form of a love-song-that’s-not-really-a-love-song, clever verses that every pathetic lovesick-ridden post-adolescent will find utmost joy and comfort in: “And sometimes I think about things, and sometimes I accidentally think about you”. The track is filled with jangly guitars that ride a ’90s lo-fi wave, a Pavement-influenced poetic youth revolt.