Earlier this year, LA based producer Nosaj Thing released his third studio album Fated to some pretty critical acclaim. His third in six years, alongside some production for huge names in hip-hop like Kendrick, Kid Cudi, Busdriver, Nocando, it’s clear that Nosaj is going places. Today he drops the video for probably the most well received track on the record, Cold Stares, which features gorgeous vocals by the one and only Chance The Rapper.
Directed by Daito Manabe, the video follows two (I want to say children because I think they look like children but they could just be small people) children in hospital gowns, miming along to Chance’s lyrics about locking doors and being possessed by demons in a largely empty room. The video is pretty typical of Manabe (who did a video for Nosaj’s Eclipse Blue back in 2012), using drones and camera angles to get some pretty crazy computer generated glitches and angles. It fits Nosaj’s instrumentation perfectly as well, with the synths pulsating alongside the grids and glitches that bump the video along, and it’s super haunting but also beautiful, much like the whole track.
It’s amazing to see how the music video form is progressing alongside technology. Earlier this year we saw Björk release a music video in a 360 degree view, and artists have done similar recordings of performances since then. With all this technology becoming so readily available to creators, what’s next for music videos? No doubt Nosaj will continue to push boundaries, hopefully he puts out more soon.