The Best Music Videos of the Month (October 2014)

Director: Little Simz

Little Simz is effortlessly cool, and so is her video for "The Square," which begins with the tongue-in-cheek line "Insert something profound about squares and circles here." The video is slightly fish-eye with rotating color filters and a stopwatch throughout. Even if it's just Simz chillin' with her friends, it complements the security, self-awareness, and comfort she raps about in the song, letting her lyricism and flow prove her point.

Director: Jesse Kanda

Arca and Jesse Kanda are an unstoppable music/visual art duo, as we saw at their show with Total Freedom at Gray Area in San Francisco. Unlike their previous music videos that include trippy dancing babies and gaping, wet mouths, the video for "Now You Know" is pleasantly abstract. Footage of fireworks blends together to resemble waterfalls, as if the video is a moving painting. During the moments when the camera rotates around quickly and builds with the song, it's as if you're willingly trapped in Yayoi Kusama's infinity mirrored room.

Director: Martin Pariseau

The fact that Ryan Hemsworth actually shaved his head for this video is impressive. He goes on a monk-like, introspective journey through the mountains, eventually coming to a temple in Nepal, riding an elephant, and doing other meditative activities alone before finding himself in a crowded street. While it's not the Ryan Hemsworth we're all used to seeing, it's a beautiful video and journey that draws you in to its various picturesque landscapes.

Related: Ryan Hemsworth, Discovering the Internet's Secrets One Song At a Time

Director: David Firth

Fittingly, this video which begins with Flying Lotus himself getting beheaded by an axe was released on Halloween. For a song on an album titled You're Dead!, and for an overall project that FlyLo has said examines his fears surrounding mortality, a video like this is almost too literal. Then, it becomes creepy and slimy, as bodies come out of FlyLo's body and separate at various points to reveal blood and intestines. Even if you might get grossed out watching it, it's as if he made the song for this video, instead of the other way around.

Related: Flying Lotus on Life, Death, and the Joy of Creating

Director: Sachio Cook

With animation by Sachio Cook, Tkay Maidza's "Switch Lanes" turns a song about being unique into a fantasy world full of pizza, burgers, and happy amorphous characters. Despite falling through the clouds and being faced with different hyperreal obstacles, Tkay seems like the queen of it all who eventually gets to her castle on a dolphin.

Director: Jack Wagner

A lot of people got familiar with L.A.-based rapper Boogie through the song "Spaced Out" that he's featured on from SBTRKT's new Wonder Where We Land album (the deluxe edition), but his entire Thirst 48 mixtape is well worth checking out. As Boogie calls out "wack" people who "roll up weed blunts just to take a selfie" and "every L.A. rapper who tries to make a song like YG," you see him having what might normally be a rant to someone in his living room. He gets it all off his chest in between scenes showing what he's talking about, while also showing a repeated image of him holding a young boy. Boogie is undoubtedly one to watch in the coming months.

Director: James Webster

Giant Claw's "DARK WEB 003" video does what he said he meant to do on his album; it explores the dark crevices of the Internet. Transitioning from long columns and corridors into scenes where everything's melting and creepily falling apart, and bodies are lying on the floors of this animated world, the video eventually leads you into an eerie, vacant office space with a classic sculpture. The whole experience is fitting given that Giant Claw is a visual artist turned musician who knows how to brilliantly appropriate the chaos in his music into a greater message about the digital world and its relation to our physical existence.

Director: Shomi Patwary, A$AP Rocky

"Multiply," like many of A$AP Rocky's music videos, includes the whole A$AP Mob and makes as much of a fashion statement as it does a musical one. However, the fashion statement here isn't just in the sick looks he, A$AP Mob, and Yung Gleesh are rocking; Rocky disses clothing lines #BEEN TRILL# and Hood By Air in the lyrics and with visuals on the screens behind him. Whether bathed in red projections or on the streets of New York, Rocky uses the visuals in "Mutliply" to show that he's coming back on this album with a vengeance.

Plus, we apparently also get a sneak peek of the new Rocky song "Pretty Flacko 2" in the scene where Gleesh comes in to dance.

Director: Murlo

Murlo's videos compliment his instrumental grime songs so perfectly, and it makes sense, because he makes them himself. He builds a sculptural atmosphere with the song before showing these sculptures come to life in various colors. He pairs the figures with atoms, particulars, and swirling DNA symbols before ending the video. It's as much an examination of the body as it is a look at movement and our relationship to the supernatural.

Director: Visual Mecca

The split-frame video for Mick Jenkins and Supa BWE's "Treat Me" captures the frustration of the song and its comment on racism and racial inequality. Footage from Ferguson and multiple scenes of police brutality flash before the viewer, as Mick and Supa BWE repeat the line, "Treat me caucasian." At the end, a large group stands in front of an Abraham Lincoln in the "hands up, don't shoot" position, making for a video that's as relevant and it is impactful.

Director: Adam Bainbridge and Daniel Brereton

Using bright colors and bold dance moves, Kindness' "This Is Not About Us," choreographed by Karla Garcia, uses a simple backdrop to emphasize the power of the body itself. Kindess says, "I wanted to try working with a choreographer and push myself to work on dance in a way that was less free-form and messy." There's a nice interplay between both him and Karla when they move together, but it's also really stunning to see them do their own thing as the song plays.

Director: Joanna Nordahl

What could be more endearing and heart-melting than a bunch of kids on a journey through the woods? Well, NONONO shows us that watching those same kids get existential and grow up to become THE BAND THEMSELVES is actually the most adorable thing in the world. For anyone who needs a dose of childlike awe and wonder to balance their cold, jaded adulthood, watch and relish this video.

Director: David Terry Fine

Son Lux's video for "Easy," a song that came out a year ago, is a startling look at an older woman reminiscing on her past, perhaps as the subject of bondage scenes, before ending to show her as the artist illustrating a young woman in Japanese shibari rope bondage. It's not clear whether the scenes are meant to be showing fetishistic or meditative shibari, but with the music, it definitely appears both artistic and haunting. Especially given that this song came out a year ago, "Easy" takes a song that many are familiar with and gives it another angle from which to hear it.

Director: Butchy Fuego

Never count on 18+ to have anything less than a jarring video that makes you question reality. In "All the Time," a lingerie-clad avatar dances around in between split frames of nature and people swimming underwater. Even while their videos initially look nothing more than sampled from the Internet, they capture the increasing gap between the pristine natural world and the cluttered digital world perfectly.

Director: Skepta and Young Lord

Risky Roadz, as one of the most consistent documentarians of the grime scene past and present, was the perfect fit to lend his bright, raw aesthetic to the "It Ain't Safe" video. With Skepta and Young Lord's direction, and shot in both London and Birmingham, the video captures street life while getting its message across—"It ain't safe for the block, not even for the cops." It's also fitting that this video came out the day after the Red Bull Culture Clash in London, where A$AP Mob and Boy Better Know were competitors instead of collaborators. It seems like the gap between grime and hip-hop is decreasing by the day.

Director: Ryan Staake

The video for "Our Love" follows an older woman around her home, subtly revealing the odd shape of a body that lays at the edge of her bed, before flashing back to her as a young woman being joined outside by a young man. Her loneliness as an older woman, paired with her awkward smile and wandering, elicits the viewer's sympathy and curiosity, even while there's no resolution or answers at the end of the video.

Related: Caribou on His Career So Far and His Deeply Personal New Album

Director: Kate Moross

Kate Moross has been an influential artistic force in the early careers of many musicians, and we aren't surprised that her and TALA were able to make such a fantastic video together. "Alchemy" takes place in Morocco and gives us the clearest view of TALA that we've seen so far, both literally and vocally. As she sings "baby I love you so" over and over, you get the sense that she's talking about the landscape of this country and the colors she and Moross have imbued onto its sand and skies. It's a perfect balance of TALA and the nature she inhabits.

Related: Future Star TALA on Escapism, Her Iranian Background, and Her Buzzing EP

Director: TEAN

Shabazz Palaces continue to have videos that tell stories beyond the songs they make, as is the case for "Motion Sickness, where an actress mother finds solace in her cocaine-addicted astronaut persona. With scenes of plastic surgery and ignoring her daughter, this video tells a very specific story in a powerful way.

Related: A Conversation With Ishmael Butler, One Half of Shabazz Palaces and A&R at Sub Pop

Director: Kahlil Joseph

FKA twigs has never had a boring or pointless music video. However, the lyrics in "Video Girl" are more about her past as a dancer for other artists' videos (like Kyle Minogue, Ed Sheeran, and Jessie J) and her efforts to shed that narrow image of her. Perhaps the one-sided look at her as a "video girl" made her feel imprisoned and on the verge of execution, like the man she watches die in this music video. Twigs inverts the sadness and pain she feels watching the man suffer to activate her own strength and dancing. Travi$ Scott makes an appearance in the video, as well.

Director: Hiro Murai

Few videos in the last year have brought such vivid life to a song's message as Flying Lotus' "Never Catch Me" ft. Kendrick Lamar, even if the song itself is about death. In addition to being shot in a beautiful, baroque color palette, it takes the dark theme of death, specifically at a funeral for a young black boy and girl, and turns it into a meaningful celebration.

When we asked FlyLo about death in our interview with him, he said, "I do believe it’s a beginning. It’s a beginning of another experience that we’ll be just as confused by and have to learn all the rules to again...The influence we leave lives on forever. The love we leave lives on forever." Through choreographed, happy dancing and perfectly sequenced shots at a church and around suburban L.A., "Never Catch Me" achieves a message of love and valuing life.