Time to look back at our 30 Favorite Music Videos of 2020. An unprecedented year by any standards, for bands, musicians, labels, venues, and local record shops around the world, this was a year that wasn’t. With live shows and touring canceled, in-person commerce halted, rehearsals increasingly tricky, the virus challenged the whole experience of being a musician. And let’s face it, that left fans also scrambling for ways to still feel connected to the music they love.
Luckily in 2020, music videos were in no short supply. While quarantine restrictions indeed altered some video productions this year, it also seems some bands and labels had more time to concentrate on their visual output. Artists like METZ, patten, Oneohtrix Point Never, Jackie Lynn, and Lawrence Lek delivered multiple videos from their 2020 releases, while labels like Italians Do It Better, Sub Pop, Captured Tracks, Sacred Bones, and Warp continued to produce excellent and entertaining content!
So, without further ado, let’s watch our 30 favorite videos of 2020. As always, there are a couple of ways to play this game. You can start at number one by playing the YouTube playlist above, or follow the slow reveal below…
30. Joon “Cruel Summer”
Every seven years, Italians Do It Better release an album sampler of roster artists under the title After Dark. 2020 saw the label release its third installment, and it included a cover of Bananarama’s classic 1983 hit “Cruel Summer” recorded by Yasmin Kuymizakis‘ project Joon. The self-directed video for the cut featured footage shot by Joon and friends on the island of Malta this summer. Just as we suspected, Europeans really do have more fun–even during a pandemic.
29. Sign Libra “Sea of Nectar”
This past February Sign Libra posted an ultra charming video for “Sea of Nectar” off her 2020 album Sea to Sea out on RVNG Intl. The project of Latvian-based composer and artist Agata Melnikova, her sophomore LP finds her turning her creative vision to the moon, with the “seas” referenced in album and song titles referring to the basaltic plains once mistaken for bodies of water on the lunar surface.
Like “Sea of Islands,” the video for “Sea of Nectar” is self-directed. The previous effort featured a retro ’70s vibe with minimalist decor, and that continued in the follow-up, but with a more theatrical and arty space. In both cases, the musician’s spritely presence brings each environment alive as she dances with unaffected abandon.
28. HXXS “Widowmaker”
HXXS “Widowmaker” is off the duo’s 2018 EP “MKDRONE.” Stuttering and sputtering like an alien vending machine, the cut’s spastic loops are the perfect backdrop for their epilepsy-inducing visuals. Self-directed by Gavin Neves and Jeannie Colleene, the pair also take center stage in this hypnotic video.
27. Jackie Lynn “Shugar Water”
Circuit des Yeux’s Haley Fohr also releases music under her alter-ego, Jackie Lynn. This year the project returned with its sophomore effort Jacqueline (Drag City). With several videos from the album, “Shugar Water” was the favorite! Directed by Jacob Forman, the visuals feature two different actors playing the Jacqueline character. Forman explains:
“‘Shugar Water’ was designed to bring us all together. It is a calling for us all to drink from the same cup and allow ourselves to let go. Let us seek refuge in each other’s arms. Let us get lost on the byway of comfort and celebration. We need each other every day (even if our mind does not remind us of this every day). Do not get lost in your own soul! What if we are, after all, just different versions of the same person?”
26. Matmos “I’m Fine I’m Fine/Adepts”
You can always count on Matmos for some audio/visual weirdness, and 2020 was no exception. This year the long-running duo of M.C. Schmidt and Drew Daniel released the 3xLP The Consuming Flame: Open Exercises In Group Form via Thrill Jockey. The pair’s aesthetic strategy of conceptual constraint, unusual sound sourcing, and a democratic approach to creation was in full effect.
That meant it was M.C. Schmidt’s turn to decide on the album’s concept, which led to sourcing recordings from 99 different musicians. The only constraint, each submission had to be set to 99 beats per minute. Tom Borax directs the video, and he collides a simulated corporate training video with a collage of light spanking sourced from daytime TV–until the whole thing goes off the rails into a psychedelic dream.
25. Girl Friday “Amber’s Knees: A Matter of Concern”
LA punks Girl Friday released their debut LP Androgynous Mary via the Seattle label Hardly Art this past August. “Amber’s Knees: A Matter of Concern” was the album’s first single, and it came with a self-directed video from the band. Describing the track and visuals this past May, the group told Paste:
“‘Amber’s Knees’ came together lyrically from bits and pieces that we’d all written over a long period of time. It’s the first song we wrote for the album. It has to do with the borders of culturally sanctioned dissociation and the willful ignorance we often employ to keep things functioning, which manifests differently for everyone. We wanted the video to be an extreme example of this, so naturally we turned to reality TV for inspiration. However, that initial idea festered into a visual fever dream fueled by our increasingly dystopian waking reality. As life seems to spiral ever further out of our control, we keep ourselves grounded dancing above a greenscreen sea.”
24. Magik Markers “Machine”
Magik Markers released their “Isolated from Exterior Time: 2020” EP on July 3rd via Drag City, and the band’s Elisa Ambrogio directed the video for the collection’s lead track, “Machine.” Day-Glo smears of guitar combine with a drumbeat invitation to the Spirits while Ambrogio presides as a vocal channeler, explaining: “We are plagued by snakes/Their venom is milk to us.” Plenty of home-fried magick also accompanies the visuals here, as split-screen viewing and psychedelic compositing make for an eyeful.
23. Sergio Calderón & Céli Lee “The Northern World”
Sergio Calderón and Céli Lee released several videos from their LP The Eternal Dice out this June on the pair’s imprint Entertaining Violence. “The Northern World,” asked, “Where is the space for art and music today?” It found the duo responding with an online art exhibition. Combining images of the pair performing with an exquisite array of multimedia from the two, “The Northern World” is a mysterious and creative tour de force.
22. Shabazz Palaces “Chocolate Souffle”
Ishmael Butler returned with his Shabazz Palaces project this year, dropping The Don Of Diamond Dreams on Sub Pop in April. Still at the “zenith of sleek demeanors,” Butler has been at it since his days in the early ’90s with Digable Planets. The charismatic rapper stars in this video for “Chocolate Souffle,” directed by David Shields and James Nugent. Featuring plenty of split-screen and collaged madness, as well as Butler’s image via iPhone, this was one way to produce a video under quarantine restrictions.
21. patten “Valley Commerce”
The patten video for “Valley Commerce,” edited by the producer’s design collective 555-5555 and shot by Yuri Pattison, proves the adage that some problems are best approached upside down. This cut is off the artist’s GLOW LP. Alongside Aegis, and GLO))) it was one of three albums released this year by the musician via 555-5555.
20. Brendon Randall-Myers “Auras”
Brendon Randall-Myers released his video for “Auras” this past September. Off his 2020 LP Dynamics of Vanishing Bodies (New Focus Recordings), the composer/guitarist wrote the 37-minute piece specifically for the NYC-based Avant-guitar quartet Dither. Thematically, the complex and challenging work deals with the notion of “absence as a felt presence,” and Randall-Myers echoes this with a varying sonic approach that uses foot pedals and looping parts to explore the after-effects of sound as musical presence.
Discussing the track, the composer tells us:
“In ‘Auras,’ three guitarists unfurl reverb-laden cascades of harmonics while the fourth captures snippets of the reverb in a looper, assembling a ghostly echo of the live music that remains after the other players stop performing. I was thinking about how spaces retain echoes of the people that occupy them, and about technology’s ability to preserve digital remnants of our experiences after they’re over. “
The video for the track uses lighting effects and processing to create a liminal visual experience exploring the nature of sight itself. Light’s wave-particle duality makes it the perfect metaphor for his theme of “absence as felt presence.” Randall-Myers explains:
“The footage for Auras was the result of a series of light experiments conducted by director Derrick Belcham and filmmaker Tracy Maurice (studiotracymaurice.com) in her Montreal studio. They spent several days combining various lighting sources, effectors, and filming techniques, putting each initial analog capture through many iterations to achieve deeper development and meaningful connection to the music. The addition of a simple mirror in portions of the final filming provided a layer of incidental metaphor and a further distance from the grounded materiality of the footage.”
19. Vile Creature “Glory! Glory! Apathy Took Helm!”
Vile Creature premiered the video for “Glory, Glory! Apathy Took Helm!,” also the title of their 2020 LP on Prosthetic Records, this past June. “Glory, Glory!” and “Apathy Took Helm” are the album’s two closers, and here they receive a psychedelic, fourteen-minute video treatment from Andrew Notsch. The Canadian duo also released a VHS-version of the album with videos for all the tracks on the LP, including the full visuals for “You Who Has Never Slept.“
18. Eartheater “How To Fight”
Eartheater’s fierce and indomitable image has always taken center stage in her brilliantly choreographed video art. “How To Fight” is off the artist’s excellent 2020 LP Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin, out now on PAN. Suspended in a dream-like lullaby, Alexandra Drewchin contorts her body alongside a fellow performer in a physical display that is both fascinating and frightening to behold.
17. Ben Lukas Boysen “Medela”
Studio Torsten Posselt created Ben Lukas Boysen’s animated 3-D video for his track “Medela.” Much like Boysen’s music on his 2020 LP Mirage (Erased Tapes), they blur the lines between the virtual and the real in beguiling ways.
When describing Mirage this past April, the musician had explained that many of the elements and instruments on the record were either “not what you think they are, or exactly what you think they are…,” but behaving unexpectedly. Likewise, “Medela” ‘s animated worlds offer sumptuous details that slide between looking like computer-generated reality and real, physical matter. Discussing the video, Studio Torsten Posselt offers:
“The idea for the “Medela” video came quite naturally while we were working on the cover art. Since all the groundwork was already laid down and partly “thanks” to the Covid 19 lockdown, I spent all my time animating, distorting, and texturizing some of the created 3D sculptures that nicely melted together with Ben’s music, and the result became this video for the fabulous track Medela.”
16. Boy Harsher “Electric”
Boy Harsher‘s moody music has always seemed cinematographic in its ability to tell a sonic story. That could be why their songs make for such dramatic scores and encourage filmic treatments from the video directors involved.
R604M Creative House does the honors here on this video for “Electric” off Boy Harsher’s 2019 Country Girl Uncut out now on their Nude Club Records label. Strange transformations abound in this stylized treatment that seems to follow one woman as she crosses the threshold between the rational and irrational sides of personality.
15. Black Taffy “And They Saw”
Black Taffy’s video for the track “And They Saw” is off his Opal Wand LP out this past May on Leaving Records. The Dallas-based producer, real name Donovan Jones, reports that he asked his friend Sean Miller to create the video, and the results brought him to tears. In Miller’s Artist Statement, he explains his aesthetic this way:
“My hybrid approach seeks to reconcile the physical and the virtual, by discovering hidden qualities, tensions, and often-serendipitous occurrences, which emerge in the exploration of multiple forms of media, techniques, and processes.”
Using his 3-D canvas as a painter might, the visual artist employs an experimental approach drawn to texture and qualities of light to create surreal virtual worlds of the almost real. But it is his ability to make this an emotive experience capable of triggering deep reservoirs of collective memory that makes “And They Saw” such a mysterious and affecting work.
14. DIIV “The Spark”
This past January, DIIV delivered a graphically intriguing offering for the track “Spark” off their 2019 album Deceiver (Captured Tracks). Edited and animated by Ruff Mercy, the Expressionistic visuals feature plenty of painterly gesture as the band’s close friends, as well as vocalist/guitarist Zachary Cole Smith’s fianceé Dani, take center stage in this nostalgic fever dream.
13. Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith “The Steady Heart”
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith released her The Mosaic of Transformation LP this past May on Ghostly International. Discussing her extraordinary 2020 effort, she explained:
“The inspiration for this album came to me as a sudden burst of joy, a mixture of sound that I heard internally and shapes that I saw internally. Each shape represented a word. I created the album artwork by using my body to form these shapes. Together with the album cover and back shapes, they create a poem intended to be shared through images.”
Sean Hellfritsch directs the video for the track, and it was an excerpt from the visuals that were to be used for Smith’s 2020 tour. With her ability to enact her sound shapes through movement, they come to life here with stylized nebulas of light playing across the kaleidoscopic images. Smith’s physical mastery is extraordinary, and as a visual poem, she indeed embodies the steady heart referenced in this song’s title.
12. Corridor “Grand cheval”
“Grand cheval” is off Corridor’s 2019 debut LP Junior (Sub Pop). The band’s Jonathan Robert says that the track was inspired by “a grumpy old man who came to bother us in a park once.” The visuals are directed by the ever-excellent Chad Van Galen, much-lauded on this channel since our earliest days on cable-access TV. Describing his efforts on the video, Van Galen explains:
“I sewed a jacket, pants, and hat to rotoscope myself as this alien gatherer. Everything was drawn onto a malfunctioning 15-year old Cintiq. You can buy them for $20 on eBay, although I wouldn’t recommend it. The music made the snow fall up and not down. No matter what I did on Final Cut, it would always fall up. I filled my body and mind with many ingredients in order to go from monocular to trinocular, now my vision is blurry but my tailored clothing feels amazing. I can’t believe it is finished.”
11. Oneohtrix Point Never “Lost But Never Alone”
Another one from Oneohtrix Point Never off his 2020 LP Magic Oneohtrix Point Never out now on Warp Records. Directed by the brothers Safdie, Josh and Benny, also directors of the full-length feature Good Time featuring a soundtrack from OPN’s Daniel Lopatin, here they return for a channel-jamming foray into simulated Saturday afternoon programming. Melodramatic sit-com meets B grade afternoon horror as fragments of commercials flash. That is, until the track’s epic guitar solo breaks the fourth wall.
10. Lawrence Lek “Prospekt 道路”
Lawrence Lek created the excellent 2020 LP Temple OST (The Vinyl Factory) to soundtrack his installation at the central London art space 180 The Strand. There, he created TEMPLE–the corporate mega-club from his film AIDOL. Each track from Lek’s LP also received a video treatment.
Using video game engines to create virtual environments, his work explores the “future of memory in an age of simulation.” Many of the videos from the series concentrate on smaller, particular areas of the seemingly abandoned club complex, but “Prospekt 道路” gives you a fuller tour, as well as a lay of the arid landscape outside…
9. TV Priest “Decoration”
The London-based post-punk band TV Priest announced this Fall that they would be releasing their LP Uppers via Sub Pop in 2021. “Decoration” will be one of the album’s standout cuts, and it received a video treatment from director Joe Wheatley this past October. Singer Charlie Drinkwater narrates his incisive vignettes over a tightly wound groove on the track. Wheatley follows suit with an often surreal treatment that places the humorous yet imposing vocalist front and center.
8. Sonic Boom “Things Like This (A Little Bit Deeper)”
Sonic Boom released his All Things Being Equal LP this past June on Carpark Records. On the track “Things Like This (A Little Bit Deeper),” Peter Kember extols the benefits of turning inward. Inviting us to travel deeply into our Being, he tells us: “Things like this should happen every day.”
The video directed by James Siewert follows suit with some intriguing visual metaphors for the process. Kember appears here as a classic bust on a Grecian pillar. With his head continually coming apart, the animated video offers various vantages inside his parting cranium. Like a Russian doll opening to reveal the next doll, Kember’s journey inward finds him paring away the stratum of his psychic being as he travels even beyond his own subatomic makeup.
7. Oneohtrix Point Never “Long Road Home”
Oneohtrix Point Never released his Magic Oneohtrix Point Never LP on Warp Records this past October. As always, it was accompanied by some highly intriguing videos like this one for “Long Road Home.” Directed by Charlie Fox and Emily Schubert. Fox and OPN’s Daniel Lopatin developed the story while Schubert designed and built the puppets. Depicting an amorous dance between two extraordinary creatures, these two take co-mingling to the next level.
6. METZ “Pulse”
METZ released several excellent videos from their 2020 LP effort Atlas Vending out on Sub Pop. Our favorite was for the angst-driven cut “Pulse,” directed by Jeremy Gillespie. This Sisyphean Sci-fi tale is set in a noir-ish anti-future and finds its protagonist stuck in a continuous loop of isolation and destruction.
5. Cuushe “Magic”
Cuushe returned this year with a gorgeous new video for her track “Magic” off the Japanese artist’s LP WAKEN, out this November on FLAU Records. The work of musician Mayuko Hitotsuyanagi, the album’s release followed a three-year hiatus after a brazen theft and repeated on-line harassment by the troubled Japanese producer Ametsub left her traumatized and without music equipment or the hard drives of material she had been working on. The journey back has been harrowing, and this extraordinary video directed by filmmaker Tao Tajima, and animated by Yoko Kuno, is the perfect allegory for her empowering return.
4. Mother Tongues “Eternity”
The Toronto-based psych quintet Mother Tongues released their debut EP Everything You Wanted this summer on the Canadian label Buzz Records. The video for the EP’s excellent track “Eternity” was directed by the equally incredible digital artist Trudy Elmore. Inspired by the album’s cover, which was done by the band’s founding member Lukas Cheung, the video’s digitally enhanced environment is a magical place complete with a sculpture garden, fountain, and glimmering foliage.
3. Flying Lotus “Remind U”
Flying Lotus delivered one of our favorite video of the year with an animated visual offering for “Remind U” directed by the filmmaker/designer Winston Hacking. The artist is also responsible for Flying Lotus’ “Post Requisite” video, and his newest effort is a techno-pagan dream of wonder and possibility. Following a deconstructed yellow submarine through surreal worlds, Hacking explains that the video “recreates the perspective of a curious child,” building a world that is “ugly and chaotic but, simultaneously, beautiful and hopeful.”
2. Hanging Valleys “Behind the Backs of Houses”
The video for the Hidden Valleys’ track “Behind the Backs of Houses” was directed by Andres Arochi and shot by Galo Olivares–who was co-cinematographer on the critically acclaimed film Roma (2018). Shot in a small town in Mexico, the short film explores aging and one’s connection to place and home. Arochi explains:
“I was inspired by the aesthetics of Mexican Classics. The photographs of Graciela Iturbide and the Golden Age cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa. Don Benito and Doña Eva are not trained actors, which gives the scenes such a natural feeling, they are simply interacting with places they have known their whole life. We got there with a clear idea of the emotions we wanted to capture, but it was really the town and the Hacienda of Puruagua that told us the story.”
Each shot in “Behind the Backs of Houses” carries a quiet emotional weight as the loneliness of old age and expectancy of death are brilliantly realized by Don Benito and Doña Eva. Combined with Olivares’ beautiful cinematography, which often uses the interplay between shadows and natural light for metaphorical impact, both video and track here will not be soon be forgotten!
- Inner City & Idris Elba (Feat. Detroit Will Breathe) “We All Move Together”
Inner City, Idris Elba, and Detroit Will Breathe teamed up this December to deliver one of the most powerful video statements of 2020, “We All Move Together.” Detroit Will Breathe is an integrated, youth-led organization fighting police brutality and systemic racism in Detroit. Describing the importance of their mission, Inner City explained:
“With the challenges in Michigan, the US, and further afield, specific to what we are facing with the BLM movement, we deeply felt that we wanted to release a culturally significant and impactful video that not only embodies the message of the track, but that also directly benefits the Detroit Will Breathe individuals and collectives on the frontline of the movement in the city. Our platform can shine a global light on the amazing work they do, and it takes the message of the track to an even higher place. We All Move Together.”
You can help support Detroit Will Breathe, as well as their legal efforts, here.
