The Best Music Videos of the Month (September 2014)

Related: The Best Music Videos of the Month (August 2014)

Director: Georgia Hudson

Didn't know that there was a style of dancing called "bone breaking"? Well, now you do. The Solitary Crew brings life to this video, using "bone breaking" street dancing, with moves perfected over years of stretching and flexibility training. In the words of Glass Animals’ Dave Bayley, "They isolate themselves and focus on slowly building their craft, with a long term goal of being able to add another dance-move to their catalogue, and a longer term goal of stitching those moves together into something cool and beautiful." He adds that this process relates to the message of "Hazey," which is "is about a parental character who has abandoned those values and eventually becomes wracked by regret." Watch the video to see a dual tale of resilience using the brilliant medium of dance.

Directors: Austin Peters & Sus Boy

Even if Shlohmo remix of Jeremih's "Fuck You All the Time" came out two years ago, this video doesn't even feel late. After Shlohmo and Jeremih finally released their collaborative No More EP in July of this year, this video has popped up two months later to remind us just how awesome their chemistry is. And speaking of chemistry...Austin Peters and Sus Boy created a phone sex hotline commercial parody video in an intentionally low-fi style. WeDidIt's Nick Melons tells Fader, "All these fan videos for the song started coming up on WorldStarHipHop, and we were really inspired to make our own in that same world."

Director: Nick Bentgen

If you were to listen to Sinkane's "How We Be," or any of his music for that matter, you wouldn't necessarily imagine a crew of dancers behind him. However, in this Nick Bengten-directed video, it actually seems to make perfect sense. The video initially starts with a group of dancers from New York and Boston dancing individually before backing him up. Seeing them all dancing in open spaces like basketball courts and skateparks, in the sun, will make you want to do go out and do the same.

Director: Tristan Jalleh

The Derevolutions' cheerful "Now You Know My Name" has an equally upbeat, creative video with computer-generated dominos falling across earthy landscapes and cityscapes before zooming out into the universe. If you pay attention, you'll notice that the dominos actually create some pretty awesome shapes before the town goes fully out of view.

Director: Jerry Production

Dej Loaf may have gotten popular recently from her song "Try Me," but she cleverly made a double video for "Try Me / We Good." Shot in Detroit around friends and family, the video has a lot of rap video motifs, from the fashion to the lamborghini, but there are moments that make this video one that only Dej Loaf could pull off (like the scene where there's a gun next to her cereal or when she wears a camel bathrobe and gold chain). This video is perfect in introducing a newer artist using a familiar aesthetic yet also how Def Loaf's her own artist.

Director: Callum Cooper

Metronomy continually has awesome videos, and this one for "Month of Sundays" wins with its rotating camera angles. While some of the shots are dizzying, the video ultimately takes a light, fun pop song and uses it to explore architectural space and movement. This is a great example of a simple concept executed with complexity that yields something really fun and engaging in the end.

Director: Danny Jelinek

TV on the Radio have had their fair share of creative and innovative music videos, but they decided to have fun and go pretty literal with the video for "Happy Idiot." Starring the one and only Pee Wee Herman, "Happy Idiot," written by comedian Jake Fogelnest, shows Herman as a racecar driver slowly losing his mind. It's cleverly pieced together and presents delirium as colorful and cartoony.

Director: David Gardener & Tom Mustill

Dems' "Sense of an Ending" follows an intriguing, masked character around infrared landscapes before the viewer realizes that he doesn't actually have a head. His journey is breathtaking and picturesque, as he climbs barefoot up rocks and a tree before finally reaching the top. The visual builds with the song perfectly.

Directors: Blair Neal and Kyle McDonald

Has anyone ever made a walk of shame look as awesomely awkward as Sway Clarke II in his video for "Secret Garden"? As he struggles with whether or not to tell his girlfriend about what he did the night before, Tink's voice comes in, with verses being humorously spit by an older white woman outside a corner store. Watch through the end of the video to see how it all comes full circle.

Director: Fons Schiedon

Soon after releasing an awesome interactive music video for "Look Away" ft. Caroline Polachek from Chairlift, SBTRKT released the video for his new album's first single, "NEW DORP. NEW YORK," ft. Ezra Koenig. In an interview with The Creators Project, Dutch director Fons Schiedon says that a lot of the imagery is subtly tied to Koenig's lyrical ode to Manhattan. Schiedon says, "There are a few visual references here and there, such as the lighthouse in New Dorp, the vertical parking spots in Manhattan and the horse that gets eaten, as a reference to the horse carriages you see driving around Central Park." This video continues the aesthetic that SBTRKT has used for the Wonder Where We Land album and brought the cover's character to life in this stunning animation.

Director: DGainz

King Louie's "To Live & Die in Chicago" is a hometown anthem with a raw visual to match. While this format isn't new—a rapper having their crew or hometown behind them—there's something authentic and honest about the people around him. The scenario is presented without frills, women, or nice cars; it's a genuine ode to a local history both musically and culturally. If you're not convinced, keep watching until everyone in the video yells, "And they from Chicago!"

Download King Louie's Tony mixtape here.

Director: Keaton Henson, Michael Nunn, William Trevitt

Keaton Henson's self-directed video follows an angry, anxious character who finds his girlfriend in the company of another man. Through subtle, fluid body movements, the two dance together in a way that makes the viewer think it will be the last time. At certain moments, the air is so tense that you think something violent will happen. However, even after dancing through a difficult time, the strings heighten and fall to reveal that it's end of one thing and the beginning of another.

Director: João Pedro Moreira

Buraka Som Sistema's "Vuvuzela (Carnaval)" video begins with the line "Somewhere in Lisbon...," which should let you know that you're in for a party. What begins as a tour through a few homes becomes mask-making and sick rooftop dancing before the nighttime comes. Then, it's a full-on party, which you later realize was in a truck the entire time. Few musicians capture the danceable energy of their music the way Buraka Som Sistema do.

Director: Harry Schleiff & Harry Israelson

Instead of a human dancer, the dancing figure in Les Sins' (aka Toro Y Moi's more dancefloor-ready side-project) "Bother" video is a flailing, yellow, Les-Sins-branded balloon. The balloon is present in a variety of sunny outdoor scenes, from an open field, to a basketball court, to a boat that eventually carries it away. It's a fun personification of an item usually used for tacky advertising. In this case, the looped lyric "don't bother me, I'm working" refers to the balloon being in isolated places and funnily doing no "work" at all.

Directors: Nick & Chloé

Pretty much every video that Bromance Records puts out from one of their artists is fantastic. Often working with the directors at Division Paris, the label always puts out next-level music videos. For Sam Tiba's "Déguisement," they took an abstract approach; it's like a coming-of-age short film meeting what would be a horror film, if it were to continue and show you what's behind the mysterious figure's mask. The video is shot impeccably with beautiful gradients and four characters whose faces each tell their own story.

Director: Tell No One

Jessie Ware's "Say You Love Me" video can best be described as a moving painting. The picturesque moving image leaves the magic up to the song, which is about fleeting love. In a behind-the-scenes short, Jessie Ware says that she chose the Tell No One treatment because "it felt confident and simple but with this slightly fantastical edge." The result is a video with an earthy palette that goes from night to day and has live birds in the middle of it. Ware's music and videos are more believable than a lot of the "emotional" videos that come out, and "Say You Love Me" will affect you if you really take to heart what she's saying.

Director: Carlos Lopez Estrada

clipping.'s videos are such perfect complements to their music. Similar to the video for "Work Work," which was also directed by Carlos Lopez Estrada, the video relies on a few powerful elements to be effective. A headless, suited person walks the streets with various items and effects as subsitutes for his head, including thunder, a brain, and a television. clipping. are weird, dark, and unexpected, and the videos for their debut album CLPPNG have been brilliant.

Director: Mr. and Fantasista Utamaro

Pharrell and visual artist Takashi Murakami have been close friends and collaborators for quite some time. In 2012, they debuted a $2 million sculpture, Simple Things, that they created with Jacob the Jeweler in Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, which had an array of diamond-encrusted pop culture items (a can of Pepsi, a bottle of Heinz ketchup, a Billionaire Boys Club shoe, and a cupcake, among them) inside the head of one of Takashi Murakami's signature characters.

More recently, they made a remix video for Murakami's film, Jellyfish Eyes, and its theme song, which had an animated version of Pharrell in the actual visual. No one's surprised that now, Murakami has produced the video for "It Girl," which has multiple animated versions of him amongst a world of anime, gaming, chat rooms, and color. It's an awesome continuation of their collaborations and also fits the Japanese cartoon aesthetic that Pharrell has explored throughout his artistic career.

Director: Jesse Kanda

We first saw the visuals for Arca's "Thievery" video at a show he did in San Francisco with Total Freedom. His visual collaborator (and flatmate, apparently), Jesse Kanda, did live film sequencing during the show, and it was a twisted, mesmerizing experience that flipped between groups of dancers, naked men, open mouths, scary babies, and more.

The video for "Thievery," from Arca's forthcoming album on Mute, Xen, couldn't come at a better time. Just when we've gotten an overload of ass-bending, shaking, and twerking music videos, Arca inverts it all in the form of a computer-generated dancer doing a lot of the same moves but with a lot less embellishing.

Director: Factory Fifteen and Nexus Studios

The Bug's "Function / Void" is a dystopic, black and white vision of the future. It follows a man and a woman on their daily, monotonous journeys. The man takes a pill to get through the day, yet he also seems to be the only one noticing the chaos and destruction around him. The end is very "I Am Legend," as the man discovers he may be the only one left alive, watching buildings crash down all around him. The video is not only beautiful and well done graphically, it matches and punctuates both songs with precision.