As I said in last year’s music video countdown, I appreciate that music videos are still a thing. Sure, it’s likely been about 15 years since you last saw them on TV, but sites like YouTube and Vimeo resurrected what many thought to be a dying medium. Now more than ever, artists have an opportunity to express themselves visually in a way that complements their music. Below are ten of the best (indie) music videos I’ve seen this year.
10. Metronomy – Salted Caramel Ice Cream
Metronomy released a bevy of videos this year for their sixth album Metronomy Forever, but nothing matches the easy-to-get story and sheer campiness of “Salted Caramel Ice Cream.” The song itself is pretty ridiculous with lyrics like “she’s happy like my birthday,” but the video takes it to a whole new level by pitting the band’s keyboard player and his giant blue creature friend “Rodney” against goth-ified versions of the guitarist and drummer in an intense ice cream rivalry. It ends amicably with everyone dancing together despite their frozen dairy-based differences, and you’ll never guess which flavor of ice cream saves the day.
9. Neon Indian – Toyota Man
This is the only video you’ll find on this list that didn’t come from a 2019 album (here’s hoping it’s from a 2020 one!), and represents a series of firsts for Alan Palomo, the man behind Neon Indian. “Toyota Man” is his first Spanish-language song, and is his most autobiographical to date as it recalls the story of his family’s immigration from Mexico to Texas. The video shows him holding posters with the song’s lyrics, a’ la Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” in Mexico, interspersed with scenes that capture his Mexican-American heritage. It’s an apt setting for a song that includes samples of both the Star-Spangled Banner and La Cucaracha. The most attention-grabbing parts of the video though, come from scenes of Palomo washing the titular Toyota for a sleazy Texan car salesman and a life-sized piñata of Donald Trump that comes to life. The former contains enough stylized surrealism for it to fit in well with Palomo’s trippy synths, while the latter climaxes in a duel between piñata Trump and a piñata abuelita.
8. Two Door Cinema Club – Satellite
You can tell this video for “Satellite” is a clear parody of Star Trek within the first couple seconds, but it boldly goes where no Star Trek parody has gone before. Two Door Cinema Club’s frontman Alex Trimble plays the part of the completely incompetent ships captain, one who’s too busy daydreaming about past successes to deal with the crisis at hand. His solution to everything? For his bandmates to join him in performing a very awkward dance routine and striking a pose. It’s an entertaining video all around, and even though I’m no Trekkie, I’m pretty sure this is what exactly what Star Trek is like.
7. Hot Chip – A Bath Full of Ecstasy
Hot Chip are known for making some incredible music videos, and the 2010 video for their single “I Feel Better,” is one of the best music videos I’ve ever seen. As expected, they certainly didn’t let us down with the videos for their seventh album A Bath Full of Ecstasy this year. This video for the title track appears to be a bait-and-switch at first. If you watch it on mute, it actually looks like it’s a YouTube video by a very dedicated channel called “Hardcore & Obscure – Japanese Retro Games.” There’s a series of related videos on the sidebar, a modest view count with some likes and dislikes, and a friendly otaku who tells us all about an 8-bit game that shares a title with the song. It’s obviously all a sham, despite the convincing stock footage of Japanese video game designers, technical explanations of the “game” controls, and anime-style characters modeled after Hot Chip’s members. The channel “Hardcore & Obscure – Japanese Retro Games” doesn’t even exist, and unfortunately, neither dos a Hot Chip video game.
6. Bag Raiders – Wild at Heart
It’s a dating show. For dogs.
5. Beirut – Landslide
Beirut’s music has always recalled distant lands and times, so a medieval fantasy epic is fitting for their fifth album Gallipoli’s lead single “Landslide.” The video is an imagining of the classic “knight saving a damsel in distress” trope, although the knight’s successes (such as defeating a rival knight and freeing the damsel/her chastity belt) seemed confined to his head. In reality, he can’t even control his horse, and the rival knight looks to be “Mr. Steal Your Girl.” The video’s medieval cred is strengthened by the casting of Ian Beattie as the unlucky knight protagonist, who you may recognize as Ser Meryn Trant from Game of Thrones. On that show, Trant was a sadistic Kingsguard member who served the evil Joffrey and meets a bloody end from Arya, so it’s good to see him in something much more light-hearted here.
4. DJ Shadow – Rocket Fuel
I’ll admit that I haven’t really followed DJ Shadow since his 1996 groundbreaking debut Endtroducing…, but he’s been slowly and steadily making sample-heavy hip-hop beats since. The same can be said for influential rap group De La Soul, who appear on the lead single “Rocket Fuel” off of this year’s DJ Shadow release Our Pathetic Age. The video above goes back beyond the 90s, all the way back to the 1960s, and asks the vital question “what if the moon landing was not only faked, but went horribly awry, and was directed by Stanley Kubrick?” It gets violent pretty fast with Neil and Buzz coming to blows, and you may recognize the video as the work of Sam Pilling, who directed the amazing and even more violent UN brawl video for DJ Shadow’s “Nobody Speak (Feat. Run the Jewels)” in 2016. Come for the 1960s b-roll of confused TV watchers, and stay for Nixon and Brezhnev with their respective US and Soviet security details turning Mission Control into a battleground.
3. Karen O and Danger Mouse – Woman
If you’ve been following music videos for a while, you know that some directors are basically legends at the medium. Floria Sigismondi and Michel Gondry come to mind, as does Spike Jonze, who gave us iconic videos like Weezer’s “Buddy Holly,” Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice,” and last year’s “I Love It” with Kanye West and Lil Pump. This year, Jonze directed the video for Karen O and Danger Mouse’s “Woman” from their excellent collaboration Lux Prima. The video was directed live for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, meaning everything you’re watching was done in a single take on stage. It wasn’t just filmed in front of an audience – the audience (including Colbert) perform some basic choreography as part of it. Jonze had similarly directed a live video for Arcade Fire’s “Afterlife” at the 2013 YouTube Music Awards, and “Woman” has a comparable feel. Both blur the line between live performance and studio production, and blow away artists who lazily reuse footage of a standard live show for a music video.
2. The Black Keys – Go
While the five-year gap between the Black Keys’ recent album “Let’s Rock” and 2014’s Turn Blue was relatively short in the grand scheme of things, it was long enough for rumors about the duo’s dynamic to start circulating. Did frontman Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney have a falling out? Were Auerbach’s side projects and Carney’s producer commitments signs of a deeper rift? Well no, but in the video for “Go,” the band makes light of these rumors by imagining a world where the Black Keys legitimately do hate each other. Their journey begins in a therapist’s office where they refuse to acknowledge one another, and takes them to a new age commune where they retain their dour moods despite all of the spiritual cleansing going on around them. Fortunately, Auerbach and Carney have a transcendental journey that allows them to set aside their differences after they remember what’s most important: $$$.
1. Hot Chip – Hungry Child
The word “meta” gets tossed around a lot in pop culture, but this is one of the most entertainingly meta music videos I’ve ever seen. No, the couple at the center of the music video don’t question if they’re actually in a music video, which would be too on the nose. Instead, the video imagines what it would be like if a Hot Chip song audibly followed you around 24/7. The song “Hungry Child” is an absolute banger, and I’d say the best song on A Bath Full of Ecstasy, but as you can see here, any song can overstay its welcome and drive you to your wit’s end. Watching the couple wrangle with the track following them around non-stop is amusing, but it’s the lines from bystanders who are briefly subjected to the couple’s curse that steal the show. After all, it’s hard not to laugh at complaints about hipsters and someone yelling “It IS coming from you millennials!” at a couple involuntarily blasting Hot Chip. The video has a strong enough narrative to pull you in even if you’re not a fan of the band, and you may recognize the couple as Martin Starr (of Party Down and Silicon Valley) and Milana Vayntrub (best known as “Lily” from the AT&T commercials).
