Although the subject matter and real-life global and personal events that inspired it aren’t always upbeat, the debut album from Flaming Lips percussionists and DJ duo Nicholas Ley and Matthew Duckworth Kirksey as Brothers Griiin feels like a never-ending party. This may be due to the revolving door of guests who join in on the fun, from Lips bandmate Wayne Coyne to members of ZHU, Shiny Toy Guns, Spaceface, and Bright Light Social Hour—but mostly it’s the DJ-set-ready instrumentals the pair churns out that establishes it as something overwhelmingly buoyant.
That sense of playfulness unsurprisingly makes its way into the visual for Joy City’s latest single, which, by its title, feels particularly serious. The visual for “Heart Attack” is marked by airborne spaghetti, exaggerated sound effects, and, of course, the Brothers’ grooving psychedelic sounds. “‘Heart Attack’ is the first music video (that we know of) that has a fart sound in it, and I think that says a lot about how we see our music,” the band shares (though, it should be noted, it isn’t the first music video to depict a band having too much fun with spaghetti). “Because the lyrics in ‘Heart Attack’ are so serious, we felt like the music needed to be fun. Some of our favorite music is like that. It's somehow heavier because the music is light.”
That lightness begets absurdist sitcom scenarios backed by a laugh track intercut with shots of the band doing their best to perform the track in spite of pasta-covered instruments. “Making videos can be a lot like making music,” they add. “We had an extremely loose and ridiculous idea about a guy with a spaghetti fetish, and once we got in a room with all our friends, including director Jarod Evans, the ideas and the laughs started flowing, and before we knew it, it was four o’clock in the morning and we had a lot of editing to do.”
Check out the video below, and pre-order the record here.
