HotShit.tv

CHVRCHES - Gun (official video)

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 16:57:00 -0400

Last Friday, CHVRCHES released yet another video from their much anticipated debut album The Bones Of What You Believe, which, by the way, finally has a release date; it sees the day of light on September 23rd via Glassnote Records. The kaleidoscopic video for “Gun” was directed by data-mosher Pensacola. Watch it below.

Bonus: we went to see CHVRCHES play with Still Corners at Le National in Montréal last Saturday and took a few videos. Enjoy.

Foals - Bad Habit (official video)

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:32:24 -0400

Oxford rockers Foals have just unveiled a video for their latest single “Bad Habit.” Their experience with director Nabil Elderkin went so well with their last single “Late Night” that they re-enlisted him to visualize the NSFW video for “Bad Habit.” The track is taken from their third album Holy Fire, available now via Transgressive. Watch it below.

Washed Out - It Feels All Right

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:49:09 -0400

It’s getting warmer outside/It feels all right

Call your friends I’ll call mine/Sun is coming out now/It feels all right

Washed Out aka Ernest Greene has released a lyric video for “It Feels All Right,” one of the most lyrically appropriate songs for summer. This single is a track off the forthcoming album Paracosm, which promises a different audial experience from your familiar Washed Out. Instead of synth-y electronic, Ernest Greene goes for a layered sound featuring the sitar/guitar/other-stringed instruments. Sing along or phase out to the psychedelic collage of flowers below, and stay tuned for the album’s release on August 13th via Sub Pop.

Eyedress and Skint Eastwood - Nature Trips (official video)

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:13:00 -0400

Manila-based Idris Vicuña, more commonly known as his chillwaver moniker Eyedress (as well as the lead guitarist of lo-fi garage pop outfit Bee Eyes), released an album with Skint Eastwood earlier this year called Hearing Colors via Phantasma Disques. We have yet to listen to it, but if the other tracks are on par with their new single “Nature Trips,” we’d definitely like to get our hands on that LP. Watch the video for “Nature Trips,” directed by Bee Eyes bandmate Julius Valledor, below.

Video Premiere: Tomorrow We Move To Hawaii - Kill Romance (official video)

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:34:59 -0400

Norwegian natives Tomorrow We Move To Hawaii are the electronic duo that you didn’t know you wanted to bounce to ‘til now. They move with bravado while still retaining a demure tone to them. Made up of one part Marianne Stranger (vocals) and one part Eyvind Brox (synth/drums), they make danceable electro-pop music that rattles your brain with a rumbling bass and earworm hooks. After years of musical experimentation, the band formed in 2010 and the Still Life EP is their first official release on Austin label Red Eye Transit.

Today, we present you exclusively the video for “Kill Romance,” taken from the said EP. It was directed and shot by Thomas Holtermann Østgaard and set on location of visual artist Cecilie Lind’s exhibition What the Fuck is Wrong with Visual Candy?. It’s a concept of paradoxes; the visually appealing and tasty look of Lind’s art juxtaposed with the ugly, hulking gorilla that lurks between shots. “As romance in first glance, it was candy for the eye, but fragile with easily breakable materials. The essence of the track was for me how something beautiful can turn ugly—love gone wrong…” explains Østgaard. “The video is a collage of symbols and expressions. In the same way as the exhibition you can look at it for quite a while and still find new details, but as someone said: what the fuck is wrong with visual candy?”.

You can watch the video, featuring the lovely Marianne Stranger and that aforementioned ugly gorilla, below. If you’re hungry for more, check out the tracks “Still Life” (stay tuned as we’ll be unveiling its video next week when we’ll be having our first ever giveaway contest!) and “Feathers,” both from the Still Life EP and embedded underneath the video.

Tomorrow We Move To Hawaii are currently working on their debut full-length in Oslo and will be embarking on a North America tour this fall.

Interview: YACHT

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:59:00 -0400

Portland-based electropoppers YACHT are more than a band. They’re a “The band, the business and the belief,” something that spans further than the pure creation of the music. They retain control over everything, their projects are 100% them and their live shows are truly a sweaty samba sparked entertainment show, with band members becoming one with the crowd (at one point, vocalist Claire L. Evans took it upon her to leap into the crowd and dance, but not before entwining herself in the microphone lead like it had come to life and trapped her in the sound). We chat to Claire and Jona before their show in Hong Kong as part of their Asia tour.

___
Hot Shit: How has your tour been so far?

Claire: Great.
Jona: Amazing.

___
HS: Yeah?

Jona: Australia was a total trip. We got to go to a bunch of rural cities that we’d never heard of or been to before. It was a really fun time.

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HS: Can you remember any names?

Jona: Oh yeah! All of them! We went to Maitland, Canberra, Sydney, Melbourne, Auburn, Bendigo…
Claire: Townsville!
Jona: Townsville! Magnetic Island—we didn’t play there, we just went there—um, then Perth, Adelaide and…
Claire: Bunbury! We went to Bunbury!
Jona: Yeah, that’s it.
Claire: It was an extremely thorough Australian tour.
Jona: Yeah.
Claire: And now we’re here and we’re obviously in the greatest city in the world.
Jona: Word. Before we went here though, we also went to Bangkok and played our first ever show in Thailand and it was truly awesome, it was really great yeah.

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HS: Yeah, I’ve noticed that there’s been an emergence of a lot of international bands playing in Thailand. How was that for you? Like, how was that as a show?

Jona: Right, yeah… we had no expectations at all and it was truly great. The crowd was beautiful and awesome and full of energy. We were told numerous times that Thai audiences were respectful and a little bit quiet but they ended up, like, going totally nuts and dancing all over the place… it was a sweaty fun time.
Claire: Yeah the thing with us is, like, touring is the only way we get to see the world, so if we have an opportunity to play somewhere that’s interesting, we will always go because even if the show is a disaster, which it rarely, uh, never is…
Jona: (laughs)
Claire: Yeah, knock on wood! It’s still a delight to not only go new places but to be immediately taken by someone who’s knowledgeable about independent culture to interesting cultural niches all around the world.

___
HS: So essentially you get the best of both worlds.

Claire: Yeah, exactly!

___
HS: So let’s get into the nitty-gritty; you’ve stated before that YACHT is something ruled by three main components.

Jona: Yeah.

___
HS: So “The Band, The Business and The Belief,” what really awaked you to this way of thinking, as a band?

(they take a few moments to decide who should answer)

Claire: Um, well Jona and I both grew up in the Pacific Northwest, which is historically—at least in terms of subculture—ruled by a kind of DIY ethos, so we’ve always had this idea that, like, ideas and ideology and personal belief systems, whatever they may be, are inseparable from art. We both grew up believing in the punk ethos as really like a way of being, and like a way of living that extended beyond a style of music or a way of dressing or whatever. So that’s already been something that we’ve always lived with.
Jona:Inherently
Claire: Inherently, yeah.
Jona: And I guess maybe as we’ve—as our audience has grown and become wider and larger it made sense and felt right to put that out front, because usually it’s just something that you just live with and have but don’t necessarily speak on and YACHT, the way that we do it, is… it’s not really just music, it’s anything we do together we call it YACHT, just out of convenience and to keep it open for ourselves so we don’t get bored. That includes music but also includes making texts, or doing design or doing video or anything so there’s an open-endedness that includes not just like different modes of production but also modes of thinking and for us. The way that we make work is we’re kind of inseparable in the way that we think about making our work and we’ve always been interested in full transparency so we put all of that outwards. Whether or not people, you know, necessarily consume all of it at once and enjoy it is kind of immaterial, it’s mostly about allowing people many different ways into the experience of our band, the ideological part of it being just one aspect it.

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HS: In saying that, do you see your creative projects as vessels for these ideologies or do you project them into a final finished project?

Claire: It’s… that’s a really difficult distinction to make I think. I think, for us, the act of making something out of nothing is inherently a metaphysical act ‘cause by doing that you’re posing the question “can something emerge from nothing and what is the nature of creativity” and that becomes really, if you’re of a certain mind set, difficult to separate from spiritual questions about the nature of life and existence so uh—so yeah, making art of any kind is going to be ideological for us but also, those projects that we end up making, I guess that come from that point of view tend to have ideological components to them, but it’s very difficult to draw lines, I think between…

___
HS: So essentially, it’s a matter of come what may.

Claire: Yeah, come what may. I think I subscribed to the school of art-making that is like we-make-stuff-because-if-we-didn’t-we-would-die-of-boredom-and-anxiety and so what… is that spiritual, is that ideological or is that just like a weird, personal tick? It’s impossible to tell.
Jona: Is it OCD?
Claire: Is it OCD? It kind of depends of the audience, really.

___
HS: Depends what perspective as well, and their take on it.

Jona: Mmhmm.

___
HS: As you said before, you were very DIY and you take a rather self-directed approach to your creations. Do you reckon this gives you, as a band, more creative breathing space or is easier to get distracted.

Jona: Hmm, I don’t know, we impose a lot of limits to ourselves but…

___
HS: Well, it seems better than like, a label imposing limits on you.

Jona: Right, yeah we’ve never worked with any limits outside of ourselves, no one’s ever told us what to do.
Claire: I mean there’s the obvious limitations of financial feasibility and scale, if we had endless resources I promise you we’d be the first band on the moon, but we work within the constraints we have and those are always changing, which is nice… in all sorts of different directions. We can’t allow other people to put a hand on our work, it’s not something that is a choice that we’ve made, it’s just… I can’t imagine putting something out into the world that has our name on it that we didn’t make ourselves. For us, the whole thing is like this encompassing aesthetic cultural experience, so having anyone else involved would just be like, it would be counterintuitive.

___
HS: It would be wrong.

Claire: It just wouldn’t be it! It would be something else…
Jona: Yeah.
Claire: It wouldn’t be it. It would be something, but it wouldn’t be it for us.

___
HS: You’d have to get another name for it…

Claire: We’d have to call it something else.

___
HS: So I understand you’re working on a television show, by the name of Support—it’s a comedy—so what can we expect from it, aside from comedy?

Claire: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry.
Jona: Hopefully, we want to shed light on an area of music that hasn’t ever been seen before, ‘cause a lot of shows or movies only ever talk about the “Rock ‘n’ Roll” culture, about partying, giant tour buses, groupies and stuff like that… and that’s not at all what it’s like in our experience. We want to show a unique, weirder independent culture aside to music.

___
HS: The other side of it.

Jona: Yeah.
Claire: The unglamorous side, you know the part where you’re lugging your own gear and everything you can imagine… all the harsh tragic, hilarious, absurd, funny realities of somehow mustering yourself onto a stage every night.

___
HS: That was great, thanks guys.

Jona & Claire: No problem, awesome.

This interview was conducted by and published with the consent of collaborator Kait Shirley, a Hong Kong-based Australian cloudcuckoolander who collects of psychedelic shirts and limited edition indie-dance vinyls.

Elliphant - Music Is Life

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 14:15:54 -0400

“Music Is Life” is the first single to surface from the forthcoming debut album by Sweden’s Elliphant. The album was produced by the red-hot team behind the Icona Pop and Niki and the Dove albums at Ten Music, so needless to say, expectations are high. If it’s anything like this very summery single, recorded with Jamaica’s Ras Fraser Junior, we are all in for a treat.

Kate Boy - The Way We Are (official video)

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 11:32:55 -0400

We love Swedish electro-pop quartet Kate Boy, but who doesn’t aside from Al Qaeda? That’s what we thought. While there is no release date penciled in yet for their much anticipated debut album, you can check out the self-directed video for their new single “The Way We Are” below. It’s available via IAMSOUND Records.

Poolside - Next to You (fan video)

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:02:08 -0400

“Daytime disco” duo Poolside has got some serious fans, because stop-motion music videos don’t come easy. But that’s exactly what director Alexander Familian created to go with “Next to You,” taken from Poolside’s debut album Pacific Standard Time, available via Day & Night Recordings. Check out the offbeat video about a plug looking for its outlet-soulmate below.

Portugal. The Man - Atomic Man (official video)

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:01:17 -0400

Portugal. The Man has cranked out another music video for the Danger Mouse-produced Evil Friends album, soon to be released on June 4th via Atlantic Records. No story in this David Vincent Wolf-directed vid… just jarring black-and-white visuals of the lead band members blinking and making weird facial gestures at the camera. But add some with weird graphic effects like missing frames and slow motion, and you get a vid that looks like messed up gifs on a site that won’t load fast enough. You Tumblr people definitely know what I’m talking about, right? Enjoy the trippy vid below.

Ms. Henrik - Mark (official video)

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:38:47 -0400

Our favorite makeup-donning boy Ms. Henrik is back with another music video that’s hard to wrap your head around. “Mark” is the follow-up to his debut single “Doing It For The Man” and the first track off his incredible synth-pop Blue Velvet Frank EP. Director Lina Engborg brings to life a strange dream set in a cowboy saloon, with men wearing pearls and women in fishnets and Ms. Henrik in dark red lipstick in the middle of it all, crooning his heart out to this mysterious Mark. It’s a sight to see, and music you can’t miss out on. Watch the video below.

Tycho - Ascension (official video)

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:32:07 -0400

Are you guys into sexy, ambient electronic music that drips into your ears and floats through your brain? Or maybe sexy, scantily clad women wandering through the desert and psychedelic photo glares? Whatever floats your boat, San Fran artist Tycho (aka Scott Hansen) has got a new video for an old song to satisfy those late night drives. Watch the Charles Bergquist-directed video below for “Ascension,” a track off his 2011 full-length Dive, available via Ghostly International.

Bonus: Also check out his remix of Ulrich Schnauss’ “I Take Comfort in Your Ignorance” as well below.

Alpine - Gasoline (official video)

Tue, 14 May 2013 10:42:20 -0400

“Gasoline” by Melbourne band Alpine gets a U.S. take on its music video and it is decidedly more cheerful than the original version. The groovy indie pop track is set to a fantastically edited and choreographed pastel-colored video which was directed by Emma Tomelty. Marvel at graceful and muscled human bodies bustin’ some impossible moves below and stay tuned for the North American release of A is for Alpine on May 21st via Votiv Records.

Crystal Fighters - You & I (official video)

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:05:00 -0400

“You & I” was my nomination for “Happiest Song of the Year,” but now I’m just trying not to associate it with (spoiler alert) trees and birds getting blown to bits. Elliot Sellers directs this twisted tragedy for British/Basque band Crystal Fighters’ latest single off of their second LP Cave Rave, to be released later this month on May 27th via Atlantic. Keep an eye out for them as they will be touring North American for the entire month of June.

Bonus: “You & I” gets a super dancy Gigamesh remix. Lend your ears to dem beats below, or download the track here.

Fenech-Soler - Magnetic

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Fenech-Soler goes down the rabbit hole in the mind/time-bending new video for “Magnetic,” the British synthpop heroes’ comeback single which precedes their forthcoming sophomore album “Rituals. Directed by Luke Bellis, the video follows an Alice in Wonderland narrative, with a puzzled Ben Duffy being followed by a malicious-looking, Frank-like rabbit in several alternative worlds. Just as the White Rabbit carries a pocket-watch in the story (“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date.”), so does Ben Duffy (but this time, a table-clock), which I want to think is a symbol for the unbearable delay in the release of the sophomore album. But after three magnificent singles, “All I Know,” “Maiyu” and “Magnetic,” we can say that Rituals will be worth the 3-year wait.

“Magnetic” is a certified festival anthem and shows the band moving towards a pop direction which we will see more of in Rituals. Discussing the LP, singer Ben Duffy said: “I think the pop element is certainly something that wasn’t calculated, but also something that we didn’t decide to turn our back on.

“For us, it’s been about paying attention to what makes a good song and about being direct. We haven’t been afraid to make a pop record. It’s about connecting with people on a universal level while remaining true to our dance roots.”

“Magnetic” is being released on July 1st via Warner Bros Records and will be followed by Rituals on September 2nd.

While we try to figure out why we can’t help but think about Gotye every time we listen to this song, you can watch its trippy video below.

Reptile Youth - Fear (Official Video)

Fri, 03 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

The always awesome, turbo-charged Copenhagen discopunk duo Reptile Youth shared new video for their infectiously catchy and oh-so-delicious track “Fear,” the final take-off from their self titled debut LP (out now via hfn music). Directed by Narvi Creative, the black and white video stars Icelandic model Kolfinna Kristófersdóttir. Watch it below.

Austra - Home (official video)

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:25:45 -0400

Austra have just unveiled the first video from their new album. “Home” is taken from their forthcoming full-length Olympia, the follow-up to 2011’s excellent debut Feel It Break, which is due for release on June 18th via Paper Bag/Domino. The video was directed by Noel Paul & Stefan Moore of That Go. Watch it now.

Empire of the Sun - Alive (official video)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 16:12:31 -0400

Empire of the Sun have finally unveiled their video for “Alive” after teasing us with the track’s audio a couple of weeks ago. The song stems from their forthcoming sophomore album, due out on June 18th via Astralwerks. Watch it below.

The Neighbourhood - "Afraid," "Flawless" & "Alleyways" (Official Videos)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 13:06:17 -0400

Los Angeles indie stars (and my biggest band crush) The Neighbourhood recently released videos for not one, not two, but three addictive tracks from their absolutely stunning debut album I Love You which came out just last week on Columbia. Regular collaborators Daniel Iglesias and Zack Sekuler spawned moody car ride visualette videos for “Afraid,” ” Flawless” and “Alleyways” in the band’s distinctive black and white style and you can watch them below. Enjoy.

Taken By Trees - Only You (Official Video)

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:55:55 -0400

Victoria Bergsman mesmerizes once again with her utterly unique and sweet voice and lullaby-like soothing melodies in her latest single “Only You,” and its accompanying new video. Directed by Armen Harootun, the video features the Swedish songstress singing blindfolded around several mid-makeout couples. Harootun says, “To me the idea of the video came from the resistance of another idea. I became tired of watching videos of the same thing: a man chasing a woman, or visa versa. It seemed appropriate to consider love as something that doesn’t have to be between a man and a woman. The video is a showcase, not a demonstration of that idea.”

“Victoria’s role in the video can be interpreted in a few ways. To me, she is blinding herself from any promiscuity because she wants to be exclusive with one person only, hence the meaning of the song.”

Only You is taken from last year’s Other Worlds (via Secretly Canadian), Taken By Trees’ Hawaii-inspired, tropical synthpop album, and was released last week paired with a beautiful remix by LA producer Jesse Shatkin aka Belief. Watch the video below and don’t forget to share it with your one and only afterwards.