10) Gold Connections – Gold Connections

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9) FAKA – Amaqhawe

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8) Sassy 009 – Do You Mind

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7) Danny L Harle – 1UL

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6) Half Waif – form/a

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5) The Blaze – Territory

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4) WWWATER – La Falaise

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3) RIVE – Vermillon

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2) Sonder – Into

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1) Yaeji – EP1 and EP2

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1- Brendan Maclean – “House Of Air” (Director: Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston)

Brendan Maclean‘s “House of Air” is probably the NSFW-est video you might have seen this year. It is also one of the most realistic, controversial, and marketable one. Presented as an anthropological study of gay semiotics, taxonomies, and sexual behaviours”, the Hal Fisher-inspired video doesn’t dance around the topic to present gay sex, bondage and more. Strangely, the video was uploaded on YouTube and was banned ten days after with 700,000 views. Directed by Brian Fairbairn and Karl Eccleston, the final rendition is graphic and can’t be more real. It it art, documentation, entertainment, or pornography? Here is the interest and no one can really answer but Maclean is sure about the artistic side of his proposition: “This was never a ‘marketable’ idea, but it was an original one that I cared about. Was it for everyone? Absolutely not. Has it been the most success I’ve had with anything ever? Absolutely.”

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2-SOPHIE – “It’s Okay To Cry” (Director: SOPHIE)

We are fans of SOPHIE’s work since Day 1 and with this new track and video, the producer is pushing the boundaries even further. For the first time ever, she is even starring in her video. SOPHIE appears as androgynous and the visuals come out with a statement from the artist who want to be referred to using she/her pronouns. The interesting part of the colorful emo-dramatic visuals mainly lies in the representation of nudity: as one can notice, SOPHIE is freely exhibiting her breast (and nipples) but YouTube did not censor anything. The appearance of the producer is so gender fluid though, that the arbitrations of YouTube on that specific topic seem to be totally outdated. And it’s useless to add that the fact she also used the same colors than our website was a solid artistic statement.

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3- Björk – “The Gate” (Director: Andrew Thomas Huang)

Alongside long time collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang, a dress by Gucci‘s Alessandro Michele and masks by James Merry, Björk delivers one of the most intense videos of the year. After exploring her sadness after the break-up of a 13 year-old relationship in “Vulnicura”, she decided that it was time to open herself again to love. From an open chest wound featured in the previous videos, there is a prismatic portal of futuristic lovers awaiting for her. In a world where everything is possible, there is space from healing of a hearbreak. The first single taken from her ninth album “Utopia” is an authentic piece of art, and it comes after years of pushing the limits of visual creations. Björk‘s ambition gets even bigger and we expect nothing less from her.

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The rest of videos are in no specific order.

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Young Thug – “Wyclef Jean” (Director: Ryan Staake)

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The Blaze – “Virile” (Director: The Blaze)

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lil peep x lil tracy – “witchblades” (Director:metro blu)

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Colin – “People Talk About Me” (Director: Steven Ross)

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ULYSSE – “Mañana” (Director: A$IAN ROCKY)

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Arca – “Reverie” (Director: Jesse Kanda)

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Kelela – “LMK” (Director: Andrew Thomas Huang)

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RIVE – “Justice” (Director: Ma-Ké, TEMPLE CACHÉ)

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Jinka – “Trash From The Past” (Director: Mario Clement)

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SSION – “Comeback” (Director: Cody Critcheloe)

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Perfume Genius – “Slip Away” (Director: Andrew Thomas Huang)

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Charli XCX – “Boys” (Director: Charli XCX and Sarah McColgan)

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Fever Ray – “To The Moon And Back” (Director: Martin Falck)

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Yaeji – “Last Breath” (Director: Kathy Yaeji Lee)

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FAKA – “Uyang’Khumbula” (Director: Nick Widmer)

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Kedr Livanskiy – “Your Name” (Director: Konstantin Bushmanov and Kedr Livanskiy)

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Kirin J Callinan x Alex Cameron x Molly Lewis x Jimmy Barnes – “Big Enough” (Director: Danny Cohen)

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The Blaze‘s music is also indivisible from emotion. Early on in the video for ‘Territory’, we see our main character crying. The camera lingers on his tear-stained face. Are these tears of joy or sadness? Finally, he receives a powerful hug and we see them as tears of joy inspired by being reunited with his family. For a while though, we see a figure overcome with emotion without knowing exactly what that emotion is — something that is paralleled in our own experience watching the group’s videos. This emotion is clearly something quite special to the duo as their music seems to aim for this nerve every time. It’s that vague sadness found in reminiscing over childhood memories or crying at a wedding. One YouTube commenter managed to succinctly phrase this as: “this made me very very sad, but also happy … I don’t know how to put it”. The rest of ‘Territory’ follows our lead character exploring the close bond he has with friends and family. Obviously, these emotions of love and family are great for dance music, with its history of being a safe space for people who weren’t welcome in regular society, but also because of ecstasy, its drug of choice. The need for a space of healing and the use of a drug that amplifies emotions are, of course, directly connected. The combination of these elements can mean that a dancefloor is often a place for people to transcend their personal identity, becoming part of something much larger than themselves.

There’s also historically been another way that young kids who don’t fit in with the world have created surrogate families. ‘Territory’ shows us a group’s great fraternal bond but hints at something more insidious underneath. At one point we see these friends being shown street fighting moves in an alley, the violence of a head butt hints at a darkness in their brotherhood. It reminds us that male bonding frequently leads to ‘us versus them’ mentalities.

The Blaze‘s “Territory EP” is house music that explores the relationship between masculinity and emotion

The relationship between masculinity and emotion is certainly a key theme here. The video for ‘Virile’ shows two male characters who could be friends or lovers, we are left unsure. It seems as if the aim of the video is to highlight the taboos that we place on close male friendships. Often the only way men can feel close to each other is through joining a gang (or a team, or a political movement) or chatting shit to each other on ecstasy. Male friendship is a highly policed space and a notoriously difficult place to share emotion. A childhood of hypermasculine bullying makes opening up to even your best friends difficult. We’re taught that vulnerability is weak while anger is one of the few emotions that we’re comfortable to show. This leads to our inability to tell the people we love how we feel, and frequently results in our anger when they look for reassurance. Aptly, The Blaze‘s ‘Virile’ was released on Brodinski‘s “Bromance Records” label.

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Obviously, I’ve just spent a large amount of time here theorizing about music videos while hardly mentioning the music at all. This mirrors the level of importance I ascribe to the music itself: listened to alone, it is somewhat incomplete. The full “Territory” EP is made up of six tracks, including the two mentioned above and two rather unnecessary interludes. Each track consists of pitched down vocals over steady house beats. Genre-wise, it’s a little bit artier than the sort of house you might expect to see on YouTube alongside photos of barely-dressed women, but not by much. After a few tracks, its formula can certainly become tiring. The music is at its most enjoyable when the emotions in the song can be attached to something (as with the videos). Like a film score, it is music that is written to evoke a particular feeling. This isn’t to say that the music is bad, more that it should be experienced in the holistic audiovisual form that the producers/directors intend you to. Naysayers and techno purists will disagree with me and insist on ‘focusing on the music, man’, but I see no issue with music embracing its visual side. No music is completely divorced from imagery. Even techno’s brutalist anti-image is still an image.

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