Probably the most delightfully macabre song to come out of D.C. this year was “Friday Night,” the debut single from electronic-pop trio Brutalism.
“Friday night!” the group bellows on the track. Their vocals sound overwrought; their synths sparkly. But this is no anthem for weekend warriors.
“It was a Friday night home invasion,” goes one verse. “Male, 6’2″ and Caucasian. Cause of death: strangulation.”
D.C.’s only murder tale to be paired with dance pop (in recent memory, anyway), “Friday Night” is giddily gruesome — and now it has an equally bizarre video, premiered on Bandwidth today.
Like the group’s earlier video for “New Empire,” the “Friday Night” visual is basically a potpourri of vintage footage, only this time, most of it looks pulled from the ’80s and ’90s. If the video has a main character, it’s a nuclear-green Pontiac Stinger — described by one YouTube user as “the most ridiculous concept/future car ever” — that cruises the beach dispensing sexy fun.
There’s not really a narrative here, though. Brutalism member Gavin Holland says he and bandmates Ben Bruno and Zach Carter just scoured the Internet for “the weirdest vintage yet action-oriented footage” they could get.
“Some of it is thematically relevant, but we also have imagery we just enjoy,” Holland writes, “like dudes surfing and ’90s robot CGI dinosaurs.”
Carter points out that while the video might seem random, it actually stems from Brutalism’s core philosophy.
“Brutalism has always believed that if you’re going to be murdered in your own home, you might as well go windsurfing first,” Carter writes. “We consider this a bedrock aesthetic principle.”
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