Run the Jewels - Close Your Eyes (And Count To Fuck) ft, Zach de la Rocha
Starring Shea Whigham (Boardwalk Empire, Wolf of Wall Street) and Keith Stanfield (Selma, Straight Outta Compton), Run the Jewels’ latest video is a commentary on the culture of violence between police and public, featuring a white police officer and a black youth locked in a strange, violent struggle which has no resolution or reason. “This video represents the futile and exhausting existence of a purgatory-like law enforcement system,” says El-P of Run the Jewels. “There is no neat solution at the end because there is no neat solution in the real world. However, there is an opportunity to dialogue and change the way communities are policed in this country.”
QT - Hey QT
As record label and pop music-making collective PC Music got their first proper industry airing at last week’s SXSW – their leading lady, QT, finally got her animated debut in the official video to Hey QT. If anyone questioned the legitimacy of their allegiance to pop, the inclusion of Beats headphone product placement was a crafty, coy (and probably profitable) nod to mainstream music.
Florence and the Machine - St Jude
A slow and still dedication to the “the patron saint of the lost cause”, Florence Welch’s latest video follows the singer as she walks through a village in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps the total antithesis of QT’s turbo pop and synthetic aesthetic, this earnestly cinematic video is billed as “Chapter 2 of the How Big How Blue How Beautiful odyssey” - the first of which being What Kind of Man.
FKA twigs - Glass & Patron
And if that whet your appetite for the vaguely avant-garde, then FKA twigs’ self-directed video is of a similarly abstract nature. The ever-innovative star set her alien pop music to a dreamlike vision of choreography filled catwalks in the middle of the woods, and begins with a relatively traumatic shot of twigs giving birth to a sea of multi-coloured satin.
Jamie xx - Loud Places (ft Romy)
While Jamie’s previous solo tracks - Girl and Sleep Sound - were a little impenetrable for those xx fans disinterested in elbowing their way to the front of a Boiler Room session, his new single, Loud Places, manages to nail the cerebral and the melodic elements of pop brilliantly. Both sad and celebratory, it samples Idris Muhammad’s elevating Could Heaven Ever Be Like This and the soft and shadowy vocals of Romy xx – an unexpected and yet totally natural meeting of worlds. Its video, featuring the two members of the xx skating around the empty streets of London at night, offers some sweet moments of intimacy between the notoriously shy pair.
