Forget Bentleys or even yachts—Skiifall looks fly alongside a snowmobile. Just watch the rising Montreal-based rapper, decked out in dapper Arctic gear, smoothly spit the verses of his new song “Bentayga Dust” in the music video he dropped late last week. As a swooping camera pans over a snowy vista, Skiifall stands iceberg tall and flows even colder in the clip’s most memorable scene.
There’s no shortage of other eye-catching moments in the video, shot in enough adventurously chic locales to fill a Bond movie (quite fitting, considering Skii’s Instagram bio, not to mention his name. Be it the backseat of a speeding luxury car, or the office of whom appears to be an elegant psychologist, director Don’t Grow Up Too Fast deftly switches up one gripping backdrop after the next. Skiifall presides over it all with both body language and vocals that nimbly careen. A handful of tightly framed, bobbing and weaving shots even evoke an action scene, while also capturing the menacing undercurrent of the otherwise swaggering song.
“Bentayga Dust” follows Skiifall’s debut single “Ting Tun Up,” which he dropped a few months back, before following that hotly hyped release with a remix assisted by British MC Knucks (who has “swag in his bones” according to Complex UK). The single was an OVO Sound Radio highlight on Sound 44 last month.
When that video came out, Montreal alt-weekly Cult MTL called Skiifall one of the hottest artists to come out of the city’s vibrant Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighborhood, before touting his turning of heads across the pond. They added: “It’s not a shocker the tune has taken on a life of its own in England. The native of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines raps in a West Indies style you’re more likely to hear there (or even Toronto) than here.”
Aside from that considerable early buzz, the Habs-city hotshot can now count winning at motor sports where Jay-Z hilariously failed among his feats. Who knows what else he’ll pull off between now and his eagerly awaited debut album? For Skiifall, it seems like the sky’s the limit.
