Mount Kimbie - Fishbrain

JUL 01 2024 · 12:00

Mount Kimbie - Fishbrain (2024) Director: Tegen Williams Era: Post-Internet Indie Electronic Era (2020s) - Mid-2020s UK independent electronic/indie convergence; animated music video renaissance on streaming and social platforms alongside Warp Records' continued avant-garde output High curatorial value as a formally distinctive animated music video within the 2024 UK independent music landscape. Tegen Williams' charcoal technique and dystopian factory narrative make this a strong case study in the intersection of fine art animation and commercial music video practice. The video anchors a significant moment in Mount Kimbie's discography, their return as a collective after seven years, and demonstrates how Warp Records continues to support non-conventional visual formats. Tier 1.5 due to artistic ambition and cultural resonance, tempered by niche audience reach. Context: Released February 7, 2024, 'Fishbrain' arrived as the lead single for Mount Kimbie's long-awaited fourth album, The Sunset Violent, their first fully collaborative studio record since Love What Survives (2017). The video reflects a broader 2020s trend of independent UK artists using handcrafted animation as an expressive and economically viable alternative to live-action production. Thematically, Williams' charcoal dystopia aligns with anxieties around alienated labor, environmental decay, and cognitive numbness that saturated UK cultural output in the early-to-mid 2020s. The song itself emerged from an accidental creative moment, a skateboarding video, a nearly burned dinner, reinforcing the band's ethos of accident-driven composition. Warp Records' continued investment in ambitious visual accompaniments positions the video within a lineage of label-adjacent art-music practice dating back to Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada. Director notes: The 'Fishbrain' video was released on February 7, 2024, as the lead single announcement for Mount Kimbie's fourth studio album, The Sunset Violent (Warp, April 5, 2024). Williams employs charcoal animation throughout to construct a dystopian narrative centered on an underground fish-scale textile factory, depicting the dull, repetitive toil of industrial labor. The video includes animated shots of newspapers and a warehouse-like setting populated by figures engaged in monotonous work. This marks Williams' second collaboration with Mount Kimbie, the first being the 2017 'Blue Train Lines' (ft. King Krule) video co-directed with Raf Fellner. Multiple major outlets confirmed Williams' sole directorial credit on 'Fishbrain', including Stereogum, mxdwn, The FADER, and Glamcult.