FKA twigs, Eusexua
Photo: YouTube
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The Best Music Videos of 2024

All of these videos tell us that it’s okay to want another person next to us.

The worst of Covid is now well behind us, but a lingering alienation, along with desperation for physical connection, can still be felt everywhere. FKA twigs invented her own word for the feeling: “eusexua.” The surrealist video for the song depicts the singer’s inner escape from corporate drudgery to a flesh-on-flesh fantasia. Pointedly, Twigs is less interested in traditional love than bodily transcendence.

Touch seems more profound than ever to people in the wake of the pandemic. From the likes of Kevin Abstract and Lil Nas X’s unapologetically queer (and horny) “Tennessee,” Sabrina Carpenter luring Barry Keoghan into a jailhouse romance in “Please Please Please,” and Billie Eilish batting her wide-as-pie eyes at the unattainably straight Charli XCX in “Guess,” it’s clear that we’re all longing for physical connection.

Other videos, like Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” reinforced a communal spirit inextricably tied to geographical closeness—and against foes who threaten that enshrined social space. Kim Gordon’s “Bye Bye” essentially functions to give the musician’s daughter permission to discover her own intimate relationship with her body, on her terms. Whether intimate or over the top—and the range is dramatic—all of these videos tell us that it’s okay to want another person next to us, if only so that we might remember what makes us human. Paul Schrodt

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Kevin Abstract featuring Lil Nas X, “Tennessee” (Director: Cole Bat)

Kevin Abstract and Lil Nas X—both artists united by a desire to blur lines between “masc” and “femme,” swaggering braggart and sensitive romantic—deliver the hottest male orgy of the year in the pointedly animalistic video for “Tennessee.” Or at least the most subversively suggestive. Young shirtless men marked with tattoos silently lift weights and pose while the rappers express a domineering yet deceptively soulful attraction, even ownership, over the group. It’s all the more charged because we don’t see sex, or even a kiss—only Lil Nas’s lips hovering over a guy’s face, daring us to wonder where this night will go. Schrodt


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Bon Iver, “Awards Season” (Director: Erinn Springer)

Bon Iver’s “Awards Season” cleverly uses chiaroscuro as a visual metaphor for love and its absence, distilling the feeling of lost love into a series of striking black-and-white vignettes. For the first half of the clip, bright light is framed by darkness, appearing within the bounds of a TV screen or train window. Then, free of any framing device, the video bursts into daylight as a couple kiss in dreamlike slow motion. Just as quickly as that idyllic image appears, it’s replaced by that of Justin Vernon sitting alone on a folding chair, his back to the sunshine pouring in behind him. Eric Mason

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Sabrina Carpenter, “Please Please Please” (Director: Bardia Zeinali)

In the cheeky video for “Please Please Please,” Sabrina Carpenter and co-star Barry Keoghan play a blundering Bonnie and Clyde, with the singer delivering an array of exasperated facial expressions while Keoghan charms as both a doting lover and a buffoonish recidivist. The clip takes the concept of an embarrassing boyfriend to its extreme, ending with Carpenter tying her beau to a chair and taping his mouth shut, fulfilling the wishes of many a fed-up girlfriend. Mason


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Charli XCX featuring Billie Eilish, “Guess” (Director: Aidan Zamiri)

If Charli XCX taught us anything this year, it’s that music videos can still be stupidly funny, outsized, gleeful larks. Case in point: In the clip for “Guess,” Charli and guest Billie Eilish tease us with sapphic winks, daytime vodka-drenched partying, and a mountain of panties. Naturally, Eilish plows in on a bulldozer, seducing Charli in a highly artificial, studio lot-backgrounded rampage. If the provocation is low-stakes, it’s no less delightful for it. Schrodt

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FKA twigs, “Eusexua” (Director: Jordan Hemingway)

A waking dream that depicts the ways in which technology and capitalism have deadened our ability to make real, corporal connections, the video for “Eusexua” sees a flustered FKA twigs arriving late to work at a drab, grayscale office filled with other corporate drones. She receives an unsettling phone call, triggering a disruptive mass-consciousness event—and some wickedly erotic group choreography involving office chairs—that thrusts the employees into an earthy, flesh-colored alternate space for an orgiastic ritual. They eventually return to work, feral but awake. Sal Cinquemani


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Kim Gordon, “Bye Bye” (Director: Clara Balzary)

As Kim Gorgon details her mundane packing list over a drill beat, we watch her real-life daughter (Coco Gordon Moore) as a runaway kid, climbing the hills of L.A., recovering a hidden suitcase, and staying in a mysterious motel room. It’s a fantasy straight out of an early-2000s indie film starring Chlo Sevigny, on a knife’s edge between possibilities: Is this young woman’s adventure banal, nightmarish, neither, or both? The punchline: She gets picked up by Kim, apparently after fleeing to simply find who she wants to be on her own terms. The singer’s steely face tells us that she’s seen it all before. Schrodt

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Kendrick Lamar, “Not Like Us” (Directors: Kendrick Lamar and Dave Free)

Released on the Fourth of July, the video for this decade’s definitive diss track is Kendrick Lamar’s declaration of independence from cultural interlopers. And in case anyone was concerned for the safety of its target, it comes with a disclaimer: “No Ovhoes were harmed during the making of this video.” Yet the clip is an onslaught of visual embodiments of Drake’s downfall and demise, from a smashed owl piata, to dancers in clown makeup, to Lamar banging out push-ups on cinderblocks, to massive crowds of fans singing along to lines like the brutal “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minorrrrrrrr.” Mason


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Dua Lipa, “Illusion” (Director: Tanu Muino)

The video for Dua Lipa’s “Illusion” was shot at the Piscinia Municipal de Montijuc in Barcelona, one of the sites of the 1992 Summer Olympics, and, like Kylie Minogue’s similarly visually stimulating clip for 2003’s “Slow,” makes splendid use of the location’s giant outdoor diving pool, architectural geometry, and stunning cityscape. The camera ogles the svelte bodies of Lipa’s squad as the singer, perhaps winking to her infamous no-fucks-given approach to choreo, hangs from a ring and is lifted above the skyline a la Esther Williams in Million Dollar Mermaid. Cinquemani

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Magdalena Bay, “Death & Romance” (Director: Amanda Kramer)

Like most of Magdalena Bay’s surreal, whimsical videos, the clip for “Death & Romance” is a collage-like flurry of bizarre, colorful imagery ripe for dissection. In the clip, singer Mica Tenenbaum dons a blond wig and adopts the persona of a bewildered Dorothy Gale, contending with an alien invasion and a love affair with a man made of light. The visual direction is Very Online and draws on vaporwave, liminal spaces, and glitchy ’90s computer graphics, but this curation is more than aesthetic—it’s emotional, drawing on the nostalgic and uncanny elements of these design trends to capture the transformative euphoria and vulnerability of relationships. Mason


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The Weeknd featuring Anitta, “So Paulo” (Director: Freeka Tet)

Yes, Abel Tesfaye has seen Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, and he’s entering the chat—strobe-lit opening credits, glam exploitation, and all. “So Paulo” is a much more convincing and entertaining pastiche of the artist’s visual influences than, say, The Idol. The video—helmed by French digital artist Freeka Tet, we’re guessing for maximum Euro-cinematic verisimilitude—sees Anitta’s masked woman with a very 1980s-looking practical-VFX fake pregnant belly strolling down the street flanked by men (friends, bodyguards, captors?) with blurred faces. Then the clip erupts into outlandish body horror tinged with absurdist sketch comedy as Anitta’s belly bursts—into human lips attached to her torso—as she writhes atop a car in ecstasy. The image is upsetting and hilarious. The mind reels, which is precisely the point. Schrodt

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