Last September’s Atrocity Exhibition was Danny Brown’s most addled, damaged-sounding album yet, which is saying something. Samples from obscure psych records are chaotically flipped into maelstroms of cacophony while Brown uses his voice less like a nimble fencer and more like a Viking berserker whose mushroom intake renders him foamy-mouthed demon on the battlefield. Even when the beats are more bad trip than Bad Brains (in terms of energy), Brown’s a bundle of restless energy when detailing debauchery. That’s the case on “Lost,” an early highlight fueled by a haunting Chinese vocal sample.
While Brown catalogs events such as snorting grams-and-a-half, watching porn on a flat screen, and getting head from girls who “swallow with bubbles,” the song’s new black-and-white music video shows him and a coterie of like-minded individuals manufacturing and selling drugs out of a tiny apartment. Fittingly, this all begins with a scene depicting graphic vomiting, but what follows isn’t so much a gross-out as it is disorienting and slightly menacing. Scantily clad women work the stove and research geology, garbage bag-touting visitors ring the doorbell, and Brown, a drunken droop in his eyes, gesticulates a little precariously with a large kitchen knife.
The intriguing video, which makes great use of peepholes’ built-in fisheye function, is directed by Matilda Finn, a visual artist whose other work looks sexy, noirish, and often web art-inspired. Finn seems to be relatively new to the music video game, but this “Lost” clip should definitely plenty of other artists interested in working with her.
Though Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition tour concluded a while ago, he’s still got a few sporadic US and UK dates left this summer and fall. Check those out on his official website.
