Watch The YouTube Music Awards Feat. Performances By Arcade Fire, M.I.A., Earl Sweatshirt, & More

Grab some popcorn (but don’t dare smear butter on that keyboard) and cozy up in front of your laptop screen because the inaugural YouTube Music Awards are going down this evening live from New York’s Pier 36. Reggie Watts and Jason Schwartzman will host (crossing my fingers for an original-lineup Phantom Planet reunion), and Spike Jonze is presiding as creative director for the broadcast, which will feature a series of live one-take music videos by performers including Arcade Fire (performing “Afterlife”), Earl Sweatshirt with Tyler, The Creator (performing “Sasquatch” in a hot pink room full of fans and friends), and M.I.A. (whose video will feature what Jonze calls “a psychedelic mirror box”). An Avicii song will be turned into a short film with a script by Lena Dunham. Eminem and Lady Gaga are in there too. Also, apparently dubstep violin pixie Lindsey Stirling will be pulling some Gravity shit involving a jetpack.

Albert Hammond Jr – “Carnal Cruise” Video

Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s solo EP AHJ was a welcome surprise. The Strokes were always a band where it was hard to see past the frontman, but Hammond steps out nicely and the video for “Carnal Cruise” is another reminder. The video simply shows him singing to the camera while walking through colorful smoke, but he’s so charismatic that it works.

A$AP Rocky – “Angels” Video

A$AP Rocky’s album Long.Live.A$AP is nearly a year old now, but Rocky’s still making videos for his tracks. And since Rocky’s videos are generally stylish and murky and fun, that’s good news for everyone. The latest video is for the album bonus track “Angels,” and Rocky co-directed it himself along with Disclosure collaborator Luke Monaghan. In the clip, we see A$AP Mob as a gang of hockey-masked, BMX-riding miscreants who maraud across the bodegas of lower Manhattan.

Dum Dum Girls – “Lost Boys And Girls Club” Video

We started the day with “Lost Boys And Girls Club,” a new track from recent S’gum interviewees Dum Dum Girls, but now the L.A. band has delivered a glossy — at least it terms of the styling — video for the cut. The video, which is a collaboration between the Dum Dums and H&M, depicts a group of leather-jacketed men and women (ostensibly the future members of the Lost Boys & Girls Club) positioned stoically while Dum Dum Girls frontwoman Dee Dee Penny sings from an Edenic fantasy land. Ultimately, she lures them to join her.

Portal – “Curtain” Video

No band in heavy metal understands the power of visuals or uses them to better (or more creative) effect than Australian tech-death weirdoes Portal. Their hallucinatory stage garb makes Ghost B.C. look like bad guys from Scooby Doo. Portal released a new album, Vexovoid, back in February, but appropriately waited till fucking Halloween to release the clip for the “single” “Curtain.” It’s an incredible piece of video — one of the best I’ve seen in a long, long time — nightmarish and beautiful and artful and just plain disquieting. Perfect fodder for All Hallows’ Eve. And many bad dreams to follow.

MGMT - "Alien Days" (Official Video)

The video for “Your Life Is A Lie” was probably the best thing to come from MGMT this year. It was a perfect combination of weird and goofy. Their new one is less goofy and more weird, but the sci-fi treatment fits nicely with “Alien Days,” a song that already sounded like a spacey B-movie take on the Zombies. Watch the Megha Barnabas and Sam Fleischner-directed video.

Mount Moriah - "Miracle Temple Holiness" (Official Music Video)

While Mount Moriah’s previous video for “Bright Light” could have taken place in space, their new one for “Miracle Temple Holiness” is concerned with far more earthly things, capturing the band interacting with the basic elements. Between shots of them burning paper and laying in the water, director Casey Cook captures imagery of wind blowing trees and sunlight bouncing off stones.

Atu - "Can Do It" (Official Video)

Atu is an Ann Arbor-based producer who makes dreamy R&B beats, the power of which are especially strong due to his background as a classically-trained pianist and musician. For “Can Do It,” from his spring-released EP Pictures Of Silence, the producer creates layers of sumptuous production which he layers, what sound like, obscured samples of 112′s bedroom heater “Anywhere.” It arrives here via this barroom courtship video, but instead of a typical let me buy you a drink scenario, a detailed dance routine ensues. Directed by Jonathan Orrell

Bleached - "Love Spells" (Official Video)

Bleached have released a holiday-primed video for their Ride Your Heart track “Love Spells.” The L.A. sister duo are known for their beachy post-punk, but in honor of Halloween, the girls have taken their usual carefree fare and added zombies and traded in house parties for a graveyard locale.

David Bowie - “Love Is Lost (James Murphy Remix)” Video

The special three-disc reissue of his great comeback album The Next Day is out next week, and now David Bowie has made a strange, unsettling video for James Murphy’s fucking awesome remix of his “Love Is Lost.” For the video, Bowie pares the massive remix down to a four-minute edit and fills the video with carved wooden faces and unearthly marionettes. Bowie himself is in there, too, both as a quiet presence in a hallway bathroom and as a face projected on another face. 

Son Lux - “Lost It To Trying” (Official Music Video)

Director Jennifer McQuiston Lott choreographed two modern dancers and filmed them flailing in black and white against a swirling spectral background. It only sometimes lives up to the song’s grandeur, but frankly any opportunity to hear “Lost It To Trying” again is an opportunity you should take. Do that below.

Joey Bada$$ - “My Yout” (feat. Maverick Sabre) Video

In the video for “My Yout” from the new Summer Knights EP (not to be confused with the Summer Knights mixtape r), Joey Bada$$ and collaborator Maverick Sabre traipse around St. Lucia, appropriate for a song built on syncopated island riddims. Motion Family directed the clip, which is a vibrantly colorful take on the rapper-goes-to-the-Caribbean trope.

Best Coast - "I Don't Know How" (Official Video)

Here's the reliably sun-drenched new video, "I Don't Know How" from Best Coast. Bethany Cosentino fully inhabits her role of surf-punk Patsy Cline here, belting out the song from the center of an empty pool, while sun beats down and people skateboard around her. It’s a fun video for a pretty song.

Planningtorock – “Welcome”

Planningtorock is a Berlin-based producer of intense, feminist dance music, and she last showed up on this site after she remixed the Knife. Early next year, she’ll release her new album All Love’s Legal. And if the title isn’t enough indication that this album will have a direct and personal message, the simple video for the two-minute intro track “Welcome” should make it clear.

Baio – “Mira” (Official Video)

When he isn’t playing bass with Vampire Weekend, Chris Baio makes architecturally precise dance music under his last name. “Mira,” the title track from Baio’s new EP, is kind of a banger. Its new video is a series of closeups of eyes, lips, and, occasionally, lips painted to look like eyes. With lashes and everything. It’s weird.

Bill Callahan - "Small Plane" (Official Video)

The incisive veteran songwriter Bill Callahan released his new album Dream River last month, and now he’s made his first music video from the album. It’s for “Small Plane,” the same lovely sigh of a song that he played in a community garden for NPR’s cameras. Callahan co-directed the video with Hanly Banks, and it plays as a short silent movie, with title cards and scratchy black-and-white cinematography. It tells the absolutely ridiculous story of two people in love, but with a communication problem that could mess things up for them. I laughed out loud more than once. If you’ve ever wanted to see Callahan’s silent-movie-villain maniacal laugh, that’s it pictured above.

The So So Glos – “All Of The Time” Video

We named the So So Glos’ debut album Blowout in April, and yesterday the band released the music video for the song “All Of The Time.” The So So Glos were born of what is now easily referenced as the “Brooklyn DIY Scene,” but in contrast with their humble origins, the video for “All Of The Time” looks super-polished and it’s totally unexpected compared to the “Wrecking Ball” video that was released earlier this month. “All Of The Time” is a triumphant song about modern apathy — it’s sort-of inspiring, but mostly unnerving.

Devendra Banhart – “Für Hildegard Von Bingen” Video

“Für Hildegard Von Bingen,” one of the best tracks off Devendra Banhart’s new album, was named after the German saint in the Catholic sense, though the new video is concerned with a different idea of that word. The story follows a nun who secretly worships the art world of the city behind the back of the head priest. Her fantasies come to life with superimposed images of her singing with Klaus Nomi, certainly one of the saints of downtown New York in the ’70s. It’s an exquisite looking video, directed by Isaiah Seret and Banhart.