Live Review: The Internet 'Girl' ft. Kaytranada (Official Video)

THE INTERNET, aka Odd Future off shoots Syd tha Kid and Matt Martians, have released the video for their new syrupy outer space love song, and you can bet your bottom dollar that the visuals are just as syrupy and lovey and outer space-ry as the group’s carefully crafted aesthetic.

For their trippy track, the former OF producers have cut and pasted moving images of themselves over all kinds of extra-terrestrial backdrops. We’re flying slow mo through galaxies, passing nebulas, shooting stars and pearlescent coloured space clouds.

‘Girl’ is a smooth yet slyly salacious track that overtly signals towards Syd’s persuasions from the off – it’s a song that comes from LA’s dopest openly gay female house engineer turned alt-R’n’B front woman, who put any uncertainties over her sexuality to rest in the video for The Internet’s song ‘Cocaine’, a drug fuelled girly make out session. I might be wrong but I’m pretty sure that the girl who featured in ‘Cocaine’ is the same one who pops up in the video for the duo’s latest track.

As mentioned, the group play into their carefully crafted visual aesthetic of DGAF new age/Internet age/space age kaleidoscopic trippy delights. The visuals for ‘Girl’ are a smorgasbord of purple hues, dappled with stars and distant planets, floating through the spectrum from deep blues to burnt maroons, all the while Syd tha Kid swaggering mesmerizingly amidst the interstellar journey. At one point in the video it seems that we’re back down on earth, with Syd lying on a juicy green pasture as white puffy clouds float above her. But it’s not quite earth as we know it – the sky here morphs from boing old blue to shades of baby pink and citrus orange to magenta, turquoise and crimson.

The deft hand of murky Canadian producer KAYTRANADA is a match made on cloud nine (or the starship enterprise), and he brings a gnarly out-of-my-head vibe to the song that elevates The Internet's solid efforts. The spectral synth and dreamy keys hang over a thick and heavy bass line, grooving along until they trail off into a spacey horizon.

The far fetched, out of reach realm of space is fitting for a song that is tinged with a longing to transcend current situations. Syd urges the girl not to settle for the average, promising that if she chooses to be with her ‘anything you want is yours’ because ‘you don’t know what you’re worth’. Syd is in love and mere earthly parameters aren’t going to confine her desires.

The visuals and seductive vocals in many ways still uphold the traditional male gaze of every R’n’B video ever made: we’ve still got an attractive female figure, wind blowing through her hair, no bra on, pouting coyly...but the lyrics bring a new dimension to the video. Obviously this is not the male gaze in the traditional sense, but Syd’s female gaze on another female. The main thing that comes from watching the video though, is that it’s still a song about lust and desire and these things are universal across all sexualities.

‘Girl’ comes from the group’s third album, Ego Death, which is out now and features collaborations with Tyler, Vic Mensa and Janelle Monae.

Words by Katie Rowley

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