Welcome to FACT’s weekly video round-up.
As we note at the end of every year, music videos have never been better. But too often, music videos — along with documentaries, live sets and interview clips — get lost in the shuffle of news and new music.
With that in mind, FACT is doing what it does for mixes, mixtapes, vinyl and more: rounding up the internet’s best videos on a weekly basis. And to remove our bias, we won’t be including our own content — you’ll have to stay tuned to FACT TV for all your Against The Clock, FACT Freestyles and Confessions needs.
Read more: The 20 best music videos of 2015
Club cheval
‘Young Rich And Radical’
Dir: Laura Weaver
Club cheval maintain that “sobriety is the new cool” in a high-gloss music video that adds a hint of surreality to anti-drug propaganda. Tie-dye turns to discipline, bank notes become pan pipes, weed leaves are pasted in scrapbooks… but that twitchy conclusion calls into question the whole video.
GAIKA feat. Miss Red & Serocee
‘BUTA’
Dir: GAIKA
Mixpak rapper-producer GAIKA presents a warped vision of the club where chunks of glistening ice and eerie shrines swirl together under neon lights.
Stormzy
‘Scary’
Dir: Kaylum
‘Scary’ lives up to its title thanks to rapid-fire editing that adds a touch of horror to Stormzy’s candlelit, noose-wearing menace.
Yuna feat. Usher
‘Crush’
Dir: Daniel Carberry
The lesson here: time slows down when two would-be lovers meet eyes, whether they’re pre-teens, the elderly… or Yuna and Usher.
With You. feat. Vince Staples
‘Ghost’
Dir: Vince Mckelvie with tig.ht
In this interactive video, a 3D-animated protagonist takes every drink, pill and bad decision he comes across, getting “so damn high” that he sees a ghost (Vince Staples) and breaks the matrix. ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ for millennials.
Tokimonsta feat. Jonny Pierce
‘Giving Up’
Dir: David Gantz and Theo Cohn
Star-crossed lovers can only be together in the astral plane, which they access with a Dream Machine that is part cyberpunk, part Blue Velvet.
Alesso feat. Nico & Vinz
‘I Wanna Know’
Dir: Colin Tilley
Colin Tilley has directed some of the best videos in recent memory (Kendrick’s ‘Alright’, Nicki’s ‘Anaconda’, etc) and his latest uses a meta look at filmmaking – specifically action movie stunt-work – to show a surprisingly touching romance.
George Maple feat. GoldLink
‘Sticks And Horses’
Dir: Leticia dare
George Maple and GoldLink team for a “tale of revenge, sex, money, power and greed” under neon lights. It’s basically a hyperactive supercut of ‘BBHMM’ and ‘Needed Me’ with a touch of Kanye’s ‘Flashing Lights’.
Simonne Jones
‘Gravity’
LA-born, Berlin-based artist Simonne Jones takes an intergalactic journey full of comets and blackholes, crash landing on an otherworldly beach where time moves backwards.
J Dilla feat. Nas
‘The Sickness’
Dir: Ruffmercy
The late-great J Dilla is brought back to life by animating old footage into kaleidoscopic fractals, which are then layered like a Dilla (or Madlib, in this case) beat.
