Top 10 Music Videos: August 2015

We’ve combed through hours of footage and gathered the most eye-catching visuals and unique storylines to bring you the best music videos of the month. Happy watching.

10. Arston ft. Christian Burns “Where the Lights Are”

Arston’s electro house adrenaline rush, “Where the Lights Are,” is already enough to encourage an outbreak of our most intense fist-pumping. Thanks to the track’s visual counterpart, we find ourselves even more enthusiastic to bring our hearty jabs toward the sky, from the dancefloor to the mainstage. A call to arms for all you inspiring producers, “Where the Lights Are” plays on the rags-to-riches motif as we follow our beat-slinging hero from his entry-level job to a 50K studio with his favorite producer. We’re not saying you’ll walk straight out of McDonald’s and become the next Nile Rodgers, but you’ll never know unless you try.

Follow Arston on Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud

9. DJ Spinn & DJ Rashad ft. Danny Brown “Dubby”

A prime example of what you can do with a camera, your squad, and a little editing, “Dubby” is a homegrown music video with a simple approach that captures the raw and authentic spirit of the track. With a few modest beatmatching crosscuts of Spinn and Rashad’s Chicago stomping grounds through a grey filter, the low-budget production makes us feel like we are just spending another day on the block with our homies, vibing to heady tunes. The focus on the fancy footwork from the Dancing by the Era crew with a ground-level camera, which puts their feet on full display, adds a sort of humanizing yet heroic spirit to the whole production. If we walk, or dance, away with anything from “Dubby,” it’s that you don’t have to have a million-dollar budget to mentally transport people away from their reality.

Follow DJ Spinn on Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud
Follow DJ Rashad on Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud

8. Loco Dice ft. Giggs “Get Comfy (Underground Sound Suicide)”

There have always been those legendary parties—the ones that go down in some super secret location no one has ever heard about, much less been invited to, where anything goes and the stories live on for lifetimes to come. Loco Dice plays upon that idea with his own seedy underground soirée, filled with guns, girls and Hennessey, enclosed inside a mattress store. While giving off the most thugged-out, you-might-be-shot-or-abducted vibe, we still find ourselves wishing we were cool enough to get invites to a life-threatening throw-down. If anything will inspire you to leave the Top 50 dance parties behind and return to a sketchy, underground lifestyle, “Get Comfy” is it. A special inclusion in this feature is the dedication to recently passed NYC promoter and legend Rob Fernandez, who gave acts like Loco Dice a shot at their dreams in the DJ booth before anyone else would listen.

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7. Tame Impala “Let It Happen”

Right on par with Tame Impala‘s signature style of psychedelic rock, “Let It Happen” takes us on a trippy existential journey through life and death. The video taps right into our anxiety sector with a literally heartwrenching sequence of a panicked man about to miss his flight. Cue a heart attack, and the cycle begins again with our protagonist finding himself in various situations, succumbing to heart failure. The power of this video comes with the visuals working in tandem with the lyrics of the song. As we watch the immense anguish the character feels at each heart tremor, as much as we want him to fight on, the lyrics of the track encourage us to feel like he should just stop fighting and “let it happen.” Upon his death, he descends into an ethereal plane of floating clouds. We can’t help but feel the intense pangs of the notion of death and acceptance. For a four-minute video to inspire such deep thoughts is truly an achievement.

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6. Stanton Warriors “The One”

For most of us self-proclaimed ravers, fantasizing about a childhood filled with strobe lights and kandi bracelets seems like a magical experience we only wish our parents would have permitted us to enjoy. Thanks to Stanton Warriors’ new video for “The One,” we get to live vicariously through a bunch of beat-fiend third-graders as they pack out an adolescent rager, which looks way more baller than any party we’ve ever crashed. Reminiscent of Tensnake‘s 2011 “Something About You” video, these young’uns bust out some seriously swagged-out moves and have us questioning how cool we would have been at 11 if we’d spent our free time organizing synchronized dances and practicing our skills on CDJs. One can’t help but wonder if this is just a glimpse into a techno-filled future riddled with Kidz Bop: Rave and sample-pack-filled Bop Its. To be fair, there have been kids dropping it down to dirty beats for years. For example, the main character of “The One” looks eerily similar to our favorite Russian rave legend from 1997.

Follow Stanton Warriors on Facebook  | Twitter | SoundCloud

5. Delta Heavy “Ghost”

As we type away on our half-pound MacBook airs, one might reminisce about the good old days of massive desktop computers with hard drives requiring two people to lift. While the brick wall maze screensavers and AOL dial-up tones may be all but distant memories at this point, Delta Heavy’s “Ghost” video brings us a blast from our technologically archaic past. Reintroducing us to Clippy—the once-helpful paperclip icon assistant from vintage Microsoft Office—as our protagonist, we’re thrown into a cyber matrix of outdated programs and 8-bit emojis. While he fights his way through a CGI minefield of cat memes and Tay Zonday “Chocolate Rain” videos, we’re reminded of the leaps and strides the internet has made since the days we found ourselves caught up in a game of Rattler Race for two hours while our mom yelled at us for blocking the phone landline.

Follow Delta Heavy on Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud

4. Digital Farm Animals “True”

Weaving together a tale of Bonnie and Clyde meets Robin Hood, Digital Farm Animals bring to life a vigilante saga packed with romance, danger and civil unrest. Even though every character in the video is donning a pig or wolf mask, the director’s savvy storytelling manages to strike right in the feels as we find ourselves cheering for our swine-faced heroes. We appreciate the point of staying on-brand and incorporating the Digital Farm Animals name as a major plot element in the feature, all while managing to maintain serious subject matter and depict commentary on our current sociopolitical state.

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3. The Chemical Brothers “Sometimes I Feel so Deserted”

When the Chemical Brothers lay their work into a visual landscape, we’re used to finding ourselves enthralled in a zany, synchronized dance or watching talking salmon. Their latest creation, however, is a bit more morbid than we’re used to. Thanks to the vision of director Ninian Doff, single “Sometimes I Feel so Deserted” goes full Return of the Living Dead in a nightmarish, four-minute tale. Besides the gut-wrenching scenes of dismemberment and gas guzzling, the most fascinating aspect of the plot turns our typical villainous zombie into some sort of undead avenger. Doff also hits an aesthetic homerun with his use of a grainy, arid landscape combined with some next-level makeup artistry and gray camera filters.

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2. Peaches ft. Kim Gordon “Close Up”

While her name may invoke thoughts of sweet tastes and fuzzy fruits, shock queen Peaches in anything but palatable. For her latest creation, “Close Up,” the Toronto-born, Berlin-based songstress enlists legendary Sonic Youth frontwoman Kim Gordon as her wrestling coach. Once we get past being completely enamored by a thuggish, apathetically vaping Gordon, we get a vulgar tale falling somewhere between Rocky and 2 Girls 1 Cup. Peaches did her research, too. Recruiting authentic wrestlers from Lucha VaVOOM, the Mexican wrestling, comedy and burlesque troupe, Peaches pulls out some genuinely impressive moves and some seriously repulsive stunts. We’re glad to have you back, Peaches, badder and grosser than ever.

Follow Peaches on Facebook | Twitter | SoundCloud

1. FKA Twigs M3LL155X

The rocket-like trajectory of the career of British artist FKA twigs should come as little surprise after spending even a moment with one of her pieces. Returning with her first project since her 2014 smash, LP1, twigs is wasting no time raising the bar even higher with her latest EP, M3LL155X. The 16-minute, self-directed short film for M3LL155X is a stunning visual undertaking packed with special effects and some seriously creative editing. Besides the vogue-crazy contortionists and hypnotic story progression, the only thing to pull us out of our enchantment is the mind-blowing talent of FKA twigs herself. The miraculous work puts her enviable talents on full display as she dances with skills as on-point as Misty Copeland, in a video she directed to three different songs she wrote, composed and sang herself. If that’s not impressive, we don’t know what is.

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