In a surreal new video from the Northampton, Mass., group And The Kids, we see band members try to sort out their romantic lives with giant TV sets on their heads, surrounded by fun, trippy animation. At the heart of these wildly creative visuals lies a sentiment suggested in the song title: that friends can share lovers and that lines between friendship and close relationships can blur; it might be tough, but as we see And The Kids' members interact and goof off, it's also a lot of fun. They flip each other off, flash one another and throw weird, rainbow-colored shaving cream at each other's heads.
"I wanted to create a story with characters [who represent] that strange feeling," director Rufus Paisley tells NPR Music via email. "These disembodied TV people just want to connect, but are stuck inside the boxes on their heads. But throughout the song, they learn to share and love by deconstructing that and getting wonderfully, childishly messy." Paisley writes that he wanted to capture the joy of And The Kids' music, which he calls "inherently familiar and hauntingly alien." In doing so, Paisley uses both black-and-white and grainy color footage, making the video feel familiar — like that one TV show you watched as a kid that always made your parents mad, or old home videos of couples in love.
"Friends Share Lovers" is bare-all, triumphant dream-pop song that's equally fit for lazy summer afternoons and concert halls. This is feel-good music for the kinds of people who can't stop and won't stop marching to the beat of their own drummers.
And The Kids' new album, Friends Share Lovers, is out now via Signature Sounds.
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