The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

The 5 Best Videos Of The Week

You know this was a good week for music videos when 4Minute made a K-pop video with dancing zombies in it, one where they fight the dancing zombies by spraying hairspray at them, and it didn’t even crack my top five. The videos that did crack my top 5 are below. Enjoy.

5. Austra – “Home” (Dir. that go)

Austra are absolutely spellbinding live, and part of what makes their show so great is Katie Stelmanis’s stillness, the way the rest of the band seems to orbit around her without her actually having to do anything. This video pushes that stillness to its natural conclusion and finds a supremely bummed emotional core in there, too.

4. Kvelertak – “Kvelertak” (Dir. Stian Andersen)

Famous bands make having-fun-on-the-road videos all the time, and they’re usually shitty quick things, coming at the end of an album cycle, made without a whole lot of care. But this one’s about as good as it gets in terms of capturing a band’s live energy and of being fun to watch. Kvelertak sound like marauding biker vikings, and that’s exactly how they come off here, too.

3. Mac DeMarco – “My Kind of Woman” (NSFW-ish) (Dir. Alex Lill)

The comments section has already noticed that I’m not the biggest fan of Mac DeMarco’s sleazy stoned slapdash thing. But I will credit the man with this: He projects dirtbaggery better than just about anyone else in the indie rock realm. Here, he pushes that dirtbaggery to an almost terrifying degree, stumbling around in lipstick and a wig or charging bareass through a junk-strewn warehouse.

2. Kurt Vile – “Never Run Away” (Dir. HARRYS)

HARRYS have explained that they made this video to evoke weirdly iconic album covers like Neil Young’s On The Beach. And the sight of Vile, skulking through snowy industrial wastelands, dressed in all white, spraying fire-extinguisher foam into nothing, certainly qualifies.

1. Janelle Monáe – “Q.U.E.E.N.” (Feat. Erykah Badu) (Dir. Alan Ferguson)

Monáe dressed up like early-’60s Twiggy? Badu’s poodle? The stark, hypnotic black-and-white color scheme? The badass dance steps from the chalked-up caveman rhythm section? The non-synchronized backup dancers? The James Bond intro lighting during the rap verse? Forget it. It’s over. Instant classic. The booty don’t lie.

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