Swedish dancefloor crashers Teddybears got their start playing grindcore—the name being a mild fuck-you to the extreme names of their peers—and while they’ve since gone on to work with Robyn, Cee-Lo Green, and Ellie Goulding, they’ve never lost site of their origins.
That’s the case being made by the video for “The Best You Ever Had,” which we’re pleased to be premiering this morning. It’s the first single taken from the band’s forthcoming record, Rock On, which is out August 26. “The song started with a guitar riff that I was goofing around with that originally sounded like some kind of Slayer-esque metal riff,” the band’s Joakim Ahlund says. The group ran that riff through a processed keyboard and surrounded it with big-beat drumming, a little funk guitar, and a processed vocal line from Atlanta rapper Gorilla Zoe, then began to move it all around like squares on a Rubik’s cube. The end result is a MIDI stomper, a semi-haunted dance cut that owes equal debt to the Castlevania score and the Go soundtrack.
The single’s video, which was directed by Bengt-Anton Runsten, follows the same logic, splicing together wildly unrelated scenes: a couple making bedroom eyes at one another, a hypnotizing clip of milk being poured into caramel, a naked man slowly dragging a toaster into his bathtub. If anything, they’re united by an uncomfortable early ’80s low-budget visual aesthetic, but the edit follows the logic of the song—cutting when the group shift into a new section, looping and repeating along with Zoe’s vocal. Imagine the Beastie Boys’s “Body Movin’” clip cut up like Nicky Da B’s “Hot Potato Style.” “When I first heard the song, I immediately thought of a montage of some kind, with weird characters in strange environments haphazardly put together,” Runsten says. “I thought of those Tumblr pages with an endless stream of looping clips, how they almost make you dizzy when you scroll through them.”
The combined song and video are almost enough to make you want to grab some Dramamine—or at least take a long and steady sip of your coffee—to steel yourself before diving in. Check it out below.
