Ratking - “Arnold Palmer” (Official Video)

Scruffy New York experimental rap trio Ratking released their surprise EP 700 Fill via BitTorrent back in March. That was in the throes of a particularly brutal and interminable winter — the EP was named for a type of North Face jaket — and one track, “Arnold Palmer,” found the crew “thinking back on the summertime/ What a time, run around, not a soul is stuck inside.” And now that summer is ending and a chill is creeping back into the air once again, they’ve just shared a sunny new video for the song. Directed by Lubansky, the clip shows Wiki, Hak, and Sporting Life picking up some iced tea and lemonade mix at a bodega and setting up their own Arnold Palmer stand. Their customers mostly seem to be cute girls and cute kids — or at least those were the ones who made it into the video.

Tunji Ige - “Ball Is Life” (Official Video)

Tunji Ige’s The Love Project came out in December of 2014, but it’s still my favorite rap release in 2015, too. Okay, maybe If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late comes close, but Ige is on another level with this tape — and he’s only 19. Today he’s shared a video for one of the project’s best songs, the brass- and sports-metaphor-ridden track called “Ball Is Life.” The visuals were shot, directed, and edited by the extremely talented Glassface aka Josh Goldenberg via Brain Bandits. (He also directed Ige’s other videos, “For Us” and “Dark Liquor“). 

This one kicks off with a stunning Bruce Lee quote and gets even more spectacular from there, working in multimedia elements and a juxtaposition of scenes like a baby watching a boxing match and Tunji dancing alone in the wilderness. The pivotal moment for me is when Ige takes off his headphones, stepping outside of the song for a moment. Truly, Glassface has outdone himself on this one — and it’s no surprise given the material he was inspired by. After watching tepid clip after tepid clip, this video reminds you how the medium can enhance and refine the narrative of a song. It is quite possibly the best music video I’ve seen all year.

Greys - “The Voyeur” (Official Video)

Toronto post-hardcore bashers Greys, a 2013-vintage Band To Watch, are going to release a new 7″ EP called Repulsion in a few weeks; we’ve posted their song “I’d Hate To Be An Actor.” And in directors Dean Tzenos and Jarod Gibson’s new video for the EP track “The Voyeur,” we see surveillance-style footage of the band in their practice space. A drone buzzes around them, always threatening to crash into them, but they never pay it any attention, and we never see whatever footage it might be shooting. It’s just there. It’s really weird! Paper posted the video this morning, and you can watch.

Paul McCartney & Michael Jackson - “Say Say Say (2015 Remix)” Video

Paul McCartney reappeared as a force in the pop world this year, largely due to his collaborations with Kanye West, but the Beatle has a long history of collaborating with other major stars. This year he’s reissuing a remastered version of his 1983 album Pipes of Peace, which contained a chart-topping duet with Michael Jackson, and to promote it he’s shared the “Say Say Say (2015 Remix)” which contains previously unused vocals from Jackson along with plenty of McCartney’s signature harmonica. This new remix also features DJ John “Jellybean” Benitez’s instrumental remix of the song. The video for the clip was directed and choreographed by Ryan Heffington, a director known for his collaborations with Sia. It was shot in all black and white and features children dancing in the street, a worthy pairing for the song’s mood.

Watch Bob Dylan Talk To His Computer In The New IBM Commercial

Bob Dylan showed up in a couple of Super Bowl ad spots last year, and now he’s appearing in a new commercial for IBM, as Pitchfork points out. The clip features Dylan chatting with IBM’s AI computer system Watson — Watson tells Dylan that it’s read all of his lyrics to improve its language skills and that “analysis shows your major themes are that time passes and love fades,” to which Dylan replies “That sounds about right.” The two also consider writing a song together, and Watson shows off some sick robo-scatting skills.

Chobani Super Bowl Commercial 2014 - Yougart Bear (FULL VIDEO)


Chrysler and Bob Dylan Super Bowl Commercial 2014 - America's Import 
 

Floating Points - “Nespole” (Official Video)

Floating Points, the UK producer known to his parents as Sam Shepherd, makes foggy, twinkly music that isn’t necessarily intended for dancing. So in his video for new track “Nespole,” dancer Kiani Del Valle had quite a task for herself. Del Valle choreographed all her own dancing in the video, translating Floating Points’ bips and hums into actual physical movement, while director Sander Houtkruijer staged a scene of two Del Valle doppelgangers moving toward each other across a vast and empty room. “Nespole” comes from Floating Points’ new album Elaenia, and we’ve already posted his “Silhouettes” video

Majical Cloudz - “Downtown” (Official Video)

Majical Cloudz’s last album, Impersonator, was a bummer — a raw, emotive, inimitable bummer. It spoke to a lot of people, but for those who it didn’t resonate with, Are You Alone? might feel like a better introduction to the Montreal-based duo. All three of the singles that we’ve heard from the sophomore album are wide-open love songs in their own way; both the title track and “Silver Car Crash” handle the emotion with timidity, as if Devon Welsh isn’t sure if it’s good for him to feel so vulnerable. But “Downtown” is different. It’s a nod to Petula Clark, a deafening admission that he is in capital-L love and he doesn’t care who knows it. Creeping doubt slips in for a moment, and even so, that moment is one of the song’s best: “One thing I’ll do, if it ever goes wrong/ I’ll write you into all of my songs/ And if one day I die, I hope they will say/ That he was obsessed and it was okay.” Watch Welsh and Neil Corcoran’s video for “Downtown”.

EL VY - “Paul Is Alive” (Lyric Video)

EL VY is, of course, the side-project duo of the National frontman Matt Berninger and Menomena multi-instrumentalist Brent Knopf. Later this month, they’ll release Return To The Moon, their first album together, and we’ve posted the title track and “I’m The Man To Be.” And in related news: Taylor Swift apparently loves “Return To The Moon”; last night, she posted a Twitter playlist naming it one of the songs that “will make your life more awesome.” Momentum! This morning, the duo shared the lyric video for “Paul Is Alive,” a third song. Berninger’s brother Tom, who made the National documentary Mistaken For Strangers, directed the lyric video, and it’s not just letters on a screen. Instead, it shows the duo performing, hanging out at backyard parties, playing with big “EL VY” balloons, and swimming in the ocean. As for the song, it throws Berninger’s weathered, familiar baritone over playfully arranged pianos and electronic bloops. As with the other EL VY songs, it’s fun to hear him in a different context.

Toro Y Moi - “Dada Art” (Official Video)

Back in August, Toro Y Moi stepped away from his chillwavey roots and recent forays in guitar pop with his surprise-release mixtape, Samantha. Now he’s dropped a video accompanying a few tracks from that album titled “Dada Art,” and it’s quite a contrast from the montage of placid landscapes that made up his video for “Half Dome.” The video, filmed by photographers Sagan Lockhart and Josh Terris, has a low-budget home movies feel as it follows a man in dark sunglasses wandering through a carnival. There’s a surreal disharmony in the mixture of these visuals with the Samantha snippet, like the two are in opposition with each other. It’s a bit unsettling to sit through, but also hard to turn away from.

Toro Y Moi - “Half Dome” (Official Video)

Earlier this year, before releasing his surprise mixtape Samantha, Toro Y Moi gave us the mellow, blissy guitar-pop album What For?. And even before that, sometime last year, he hiked to Half Dome Mountain in Yosemite. There, he happened to meet photographer and fan R. Adam Prieto, who was talked into filming the video for the album track “Half Dome,” mostly by taking in the stunning landscape around Yosemite, often in time-lapse. Toro Y Moi does appear in the video, but you have to keep your eyes peeled to spot him. Watch the video below.

Lionlimb - “Bored Today” (Official Video)

If you loved Tobias Jesso Jr.’s earnest, piano ballad heartbreaker Goon then odds are you’ll connect with what Lionlimb is doing. The dreamy Nashville psych-fuzz project is helmed by Stewart Bronaugh and Joshua Jaeger, who spent 2014 touring with Angel Olsen behind her smoldering folk brooder Burn Your Fire For No Witness. On their own now, Bronaugh and Jaeger are releasing their debut 7-inch next week. We’ve already heard the polished, melodic “Turnstile” and today they’ve shared “Bored Today” via a dark video clip. The clips chronicles a jam out session that matches the song’s woozy feel.

Shopping - “Straight Lines” Video (NSFW)

London’s Shopping just released their new album, Why Choose, last week, and today they’ve followed it up with an excellent video to accompany the record’s second single, “Straight Lines.” When I interviewed Shopping about Why Choose, Andrew Milk told me that this song is a response to “For Your Money,” which was released on their debut album, Consumer Complaints. The song basically tells the story of a gold digger who’s in a relationship for the economic benefits, rather than the emotional ones. The Margarita Louca-directed video is an ace visual reinterpretation of that sentiment.

NEEDS - “Walk, Cycle, Or Take Transit Like Jehu” (Official Video)

The Vancouver-based hardcore band NEEDS released their self-titled debut this past spring, a record that’s kinda-sorta politically minded, but mostly really fun to listen to. NEEDS don’t take themselves too seriously, as is made apparent by the band-name-tweaking title of one of their earliest singles, “Walk, Cycle, Or Take Transit Like Jehu.” The accompanying video finds the band performing amidst a cycling class. Watch the Matt Leaf-directed clip.

Mac Miller - “Clubhouse” (Official Video)

The Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller released his impressive GO:OD AM album last week, and we’ve already posted his videos for “100 Grandkids” and “Brand Name.” Today, he gives us a third video, a fun and inventive clip for the loping album track “Clubhouse.” This one is some sort of collaboration between Pitchfork and GoPro, and the director, my old Pitchfork co-worker Eavvon O’Neal (real good guy) shot the entire thing on a GoPro. The clip finds Miller at an indoor swimming pool, spending quality time with a team of synchronized swimmers. He wears two gold chains while actually swimming, which can’t be good for the chains, right?

Tall Juan - “Why Not?” (Official Video)

In what looks like pretty much the coolest home studio ever, a Captain America cutout adorns a wall and a giant cactus towers above the whole room like the eye of Sauron. Born from the DIY ethics of bedroom acoustics is the garage-rock sound of Argentine-born Tall Juan, now based in Far Rockaway, Queens. Juan played in the Beets and was a sideman for Juan Wauters, but now he’s going solo, with an EP called Why Not? coming soon. The video for the title track, directed by Andrew Gibson, was recorded live from his actual home. That’s a very Mac DeMarco-like move, so it’s no surprise that the EP was produced by DeMarco at Jizz Jazz studios and exhibits a similar lo-fi, slacker feel. The “Why Not?” video is as raw and feel-good as can be, the band jamming along together in a cozy bedroom setup with a drum kit that has a bunch of clothes stuffed inside the head.

Hear David Bowie’s Theme To The Last Panthers

Not long ago, we reported that David Bowie had written the theme song for The Last Panthers, a new TV show from Sky Atlantic and Canal+. As it turns out, Bowie’s song isn’t exactly something he wrote for the show. Instead, it’s about a 45-second excerpt from an unreleased song called Darkstar. But it’s still an intriguing piece of music, a slow, experimental, operatic piece that recalls both Bowie’s Berlin period and Scott Walker (the experimental music legend, not the dickbag Wisconsin governor.) As Pitchfork points out, the show’s True Detective-esque opening-credits sequence, with the Bowie music attached, are now online.

James Franco & Lenny Kravitz Made A Guitar Hero Commercial

Guitar Hero has a new edition coming out in a few weeks, and they rounded up James Franco and Lenny Kravitz to play the game for a commercial. Both of them get booed by the imaginary crowd at the beginning but eventually learn how to play along — very ~inspirational~. Franco references Kravitz’s pant-splitting incident, and ends the whole thing by smashing the guitar-shaped controller. A true punk! Not pictured is Kravitz’s new ’70s-inspired furniture collection.

Braids - “Taste” Video (NSFW)

I can already feel Braids’ great new album, Deep In The Iris, being relegated to the same perpetually underrated status as their previous two releases, Native Speaker and Flourish/Perish. That’s a shame, because Iris may be the band’s best album yet, filled with great and powerful songs. “Taste” is one of those many songs, and it’s just gotten the video treatment courtesy of director Kevan Funk, who the band had previously collaborated with on the “Miniskirt” video. It’s a striking, bold clip featuring vocalist Raphaelle Standell standing in the middle of a pack of dancers or alone in the woods cut together with stark shots of naked bodies. Here’s how Funk described the video in some notes written during its conception:

I see this as a series of scenes of various people (all different ages, races, orientations), mostly in their homes, naked. I see it as these scenes that would almost feel a bit like portraiture, these images that have a mixture of being beautiful and in someways haunting. Maybe just people alone, maybe together, not entirely sure. I like the idea of the viewer projecting this idea on to the individuals, that refrain of ‘we experience the love that we think we deserve’ somehow leading us to assume the type of life these people have had, who and how they love and have been loved.

Watch it below via Nowness.