Visual Albums Explored and Who's Got Next
The concept of the music video has existed as long as the invention of the film camera itself.
Defined simply as “a video of variable length, that integrates a music song or music album with imagery that is produced for promotional or musical artistic purposes” music videos have been a powerful bridge between the sonic and visual medium for decades now.
Popular bands like Queen and The Beatles were early adopters and innovators of incorporating music with film but it wasn’t until the 1980s that music videos went mainstream, aided by the rise of the music and youth centric focused cable channel, MTV. Artists like Madonna and Michael Jackson solidified their footprint in the music industry and became bona fide pop icons by releasing eye popping and stunning videos to help visualize their music and lyrics. Michael Jackson’s iconic 14 minute video to “Thriller'' along with other videos, helped break down the color barrier MTV had with programming black artists and music.
While the genre of music videos have largely focused on short form, longer feature length films have been used by musicians for decades to promote their work too.
While artists like The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Daft Punk had created music film projects in the past, it was when Beyoncé dropped her film and album, Lemonade, that a new term was popularized.
The Visual Album
Too long to be a music video, but not structured and scripted enough to be considered a musical movie, visual albums combine all the best parts of story, music and film to create one multi-layered experience.
Lemonade explored the ups and downs of Beyoncé’s marriage along with highlighting feminism, black Southern culture, police brutality and more. Shown in the same order of the album track list, the music videos are loosely connected to tell one complete story.
When it premiered on HBO in 2016, it shook the world up, praised for its staggering visuals, its relevant social themes and innovative and genre bending music. After it came out, several artists over the years followed up with their own films to accompany their new albums such as Halsey, Melanie Martinez, Janelle Monae, Kacey Musgraves, and even Beyoncé’s own sister, Solange.
Lemonade wasn’t the first visual album but it did re-popularize the format and is still the most critically acclaimed attempt of recent times.
With cheaper cameras and the accessibility of the internet, anyone could make music videos or a full visual album now if they wanted to. The rise of streaming services has also allowed artists more platforms to premiere their work, like Kacey Musgraves putting Star-Crossed on Paramount+ or Halsey with If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power on HBO Max.
I still think there’s a certain set of rules that a mainstream artist needs to follow if they want to make an effective visual album.
A good visual album combines excellent music with strong storytelling. The artists over the years who have made the best music films are musicians who already paint pictures with their lyrics and then further that with their performances, short videos, performances etc. to the point that a full length film feels like a logical next step.
We don’t get Dirty Computer without “Q.U.E.E.N”, When I Get Home doesn’t exist without “Cranes in the Sky”. No one would tune into Star-Crossed if Kacey Musgraves hadn’t proven herself with the visual concepts she made with her last album Golden Hour.
This growth period is very necessary or no one would care.
In 2019, pop wunderkind, Khalid, released an accompanying film to his sophomore album, Free Spirit. While his music is commercially successful, he has millions of fans and chart topping radio hits, when it came time for people to pay attention to him outside of music, it was met with little fanfare. Khalid has never proven himself as a visual artist. His previous music videos and stage performances were not that memorable and his album never had a strong enough overall concept to feel like a whole film was justified to promote it. Audiences weren’t going to sit through a forty minute movie for an artist who hadn’t proved himself in that space.
It’s important that musicians don’t try to rush steps as they build their careers and brand outside of the music.
There are several artists out right now who have the musical, storytelling and visual prowess to finally make a visual album of their own.
FKA Twigs
Ever the experimental and genre bending, FKA Twigs started her career first as a backup dancer before transitioning to music in 2012. The music videos for her first batch of EPs were highly abstract, dense and at times grotesque to watch. While those early videos weren’t noticed by much of the public, they, along with her unique experimental electronica sound helped her curate a small and passionate fanbase.
When her first studio album, LP1, rolled around she had a minor commercial hit with the lead single “Two Weeks”, but it was the music video for Pendulum that showed her true potential. FKA Twigs spends five minutes wrapped in her own hair braids and hanging from the ceiling in bondage like positions. It’s impressive to look at and is one of the first showings of Twigs’ continued use of sex worker motifs.
Twigs’ did release a short film to her three song EP, M3LL155X, in 2015, where she goes from usual her abstract images, to dressing up as a blow up sex doll to hip hop choreography and more.
It took four years for a follow up album. In that time, FKA Twigs had undergone painful fibroid surgery that took several months to recover from. To regain control of her body, she took up pole dancing, wushu martial arts and sword fighting. When she released her devastating and critically acclaimed album, Magdalene, in 2019, the accompanying visuals and stage performances had her pushing physical limits in ways we’ve never seen from today’s performers.
In her Grammy nominated video for “Cellophane”, she does an intense pole dancing routine, her body undulating and contorting in a gorgeous, elaborate, custom made Ed Merler bikini . It’s one of most beautiful videos of the decade that thoroughly earned it’s critical acclaim.
She followed up “Cellophane'' with a video for “Sad Day”. Helmed by known filmmaker Hiro Murai (directed Atlanta, Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”, etc.), “Sad Day” feels like a sneak peek into a longer project. Twigs’ sword fights a mysterious opponent throughout the London city streets and both her and her co-star, Teake, do all their own stunts, making it an extra satisfying watch.
Longer forms of storytelling is something FKA Twigs is interested in as she is developing a martial arts show based on the “Sad Day” music video with FX. Time will tell where she lands in the future but her unique skills as a performer and visual artist make her primed and ready for a visual album.
Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar is easily one of the greatest hip hop artists of the last decade.
His major label debut, Good Kid, M.A.A.D City shot him into super stardom in 2012. Kendrick’s music sometimes feels like one act plays, as he explores many hard topics such as gang violence, racism, alcoholism and more. While music videos and performances of his debut era were always nice, it wasn’t until his follow up, To Pimp A Butterfly that masses saw his true genius. An album exploring several African American issues, it was released in 2015 at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was fully picking up steam. While there have been many attempts over the years by artists to make protest music, “Alright” is probably the only song from the 2010s that really stuck around. It’s a powerful anthem about black resistance with an even more powerful video.
Shot in black and white, the video starts in Oakland with several eerie scenes spliced together. We see a woman crying, a young boy running from a gang etc. The next extended scene is shown with a black man tackled by a police officer, he runs free and the officer pulls out his gun and shoots. We don’t see the aftermath but switch to Kendrick and his crew riding in a car. At first everything seems normal till we see that the wheels of the car are replaced by four police officers carrying it. It’s after this that the song finally starts, three minutes into the music video.
Kendrick floats in the air through Oakland and then Los Angeles as scenes of black life pass him by. In the end while standing on a lamp post a police officer guns Kendrick down and he falls to the ground with a smile, signifying that even in the face of systemic violence, black people will always overcome.
Along with other electrifying videos such as “Humble” or his performances, Kendrick Lamar has never been afraid to be a bold voice in hip hop.
If one day he decides to do a full length project, it’ll be refreshing to see it from an artist so unafraid of politics and blackness.
Doja Cat
Doja Cat is an artist you can tell always had the creative juice, she just needed the outlet and backing to make it happen. She went viral in 2018 for her campy “Mooo!” song and video that caused an avalanche of internet memes. Seeing a woman rap that she was a cow in front of anime boobs was something you don’t see everyday. When I went to re-watch the video for the first time in years, I was struck by how normal the song felt to me. Yes it’s a bit silly, but not as silly as it felt back then and not silly at all when you become familiar with Doja Cat’s discography (especially her SoundCloud material). That’s what makes Doja one of the most compelling pop stars out right now, she can sell the goofy side without making it cringe all while making fun, catchy music. No wonder her music is consistently going viral on social media.
The era for her second album, Hot Pink, was fun because you could literally see her record label giving her a higher budget as she gained steam. She was forced to promote this album at the height of the pandemic in 2020 and she was one of the most creative artists who used the virtual performance format to her advantage.
She performed her hit song, “Say So” a million and two times over the year and no performance looked the same. A particularly memorable one is at the 2020 MTV EMAs. Doja Cat slowly crawls out of a staticky TV and arrives on a darkly lit set, with a shaggy black haircut and dark eyeliner. When she starts performing the song, gone is the light disco-esque pop tune everyone had become accustomed to, instead “Say So” is transformed into a heavy metal banger, with Doja shrieking and wailing through the song as if this was the genre she always performed in. It was an unexpected switch up and just another great example of her versatility.
When her 2021 album, Planet Her arrived, so did several music videos surrounding themes of space and the cosmos. Some of the best videos of her career have come out in just the past year and if you scroll through her twitter, she has a complex if a bit haphazard explanation of the Planet Her lore that threads all her visuals together. It’s one of the more ambitious concepts we’ve seen in mainstream music lately, but I couldn’t help but feel that what I saw wasn’t necessarily connecting to what I was hearing on the album. While Planet Her’s concept was dense, the actual music mostly just tells unconnected tales of love and lust that you’d find on any standard pop album. I would love to see Doja Cat marry the visuals and music together better on a full length film. I believe she is completely ready for it and that Planet Her was just the first step to claiming her crown.
Stromae
Stromae is one of Belgium’s most unexpected musical exports.
His first big hit “Alors on Danse”, set the European charts ablaze in 2009 and his career has been running strong ever since. Stromae fuses dance pop with hip hop and Afrobeat elements to make a unique sound that has left music listeners addicted for over a decade now.
Lyrically, Stromae loves to play around with words, puns and allusions (even his stage name is an inverted term for maestro) that makes his music extra rewarding for French speakers. That playfulness manifests outside of the music as well. “Papaoutai” is the lead single of his second album Racine Carrée, and details the loss of a father. Despite the tragic nature of the lyrics the song is an upbeat dance number and the video is even more fun, showing colorful dancers in a fake suburban set. In the video, Stromae is the distant father, acting as a stiff doll as his son dances around him and begs for him to come back to life and to him. The final verse has Stromae come alive and finish the dance with his son. Even for non French speakers it’s an easy yet striking video to watch and understand.
Stromae cut his tour short in 2014 after health issues. It was a long eight years until he returned to the public eye with his new album Multitude. The older Stromae returned was a bit different this time, a little less quirky, a little more dark but still the same deep, meaningful lyrics and clever word play were present. Multitude travels around the world, pulling from Japan, Congo, Ghana and more to create a fresh blend of pop music. Playing around with concepts visually and sonically is something Stromae excels at, a visual album doesn’t seem too far off at all.
Rosalia
Spanish art pop singer Rosalia doesn’t know how to make a body of work without an overall theme.
Her first album, Los Angeles, had her covering traditional flamenco songs that explore the idea of death. While she didn’t write a single lyric on her first album, she still manages to make a cohesive body of work sonically and visually, The album cover is a simple, striking black and white image of Rosalia’s face, looking forlorn, as if contemplating her own demise herself.
The standout music video from that era is for “Aunque Es De Noche”. We start the video in a car full of glittery Christian imagery and follow it along until we see Rosalia singing in a cemetery as artful scribbles show up drawn on the screen. It isn’t an expensive music video, but it’s striking and showed her promise as an artist.
A couple of years later Rosalia released her blockbuster sophomore album, El Mal Querer. This time she’s writing and producing the music herself and she wowed critics and international listeners alike with her unique pop flamenco fusion sound. El Mal Querer is a concept album about a toxic relationship and based on the classic 13th century book Flamenca.
Rosalia stands like an angel on the album cover, surrounded by clouds and a golden circle, as if looking down from above observing the events she writes about in her album. Artist Filip Ćustić worked with her to conceptualize most of the album photoshoot.
Rosalia shoots all of her music videos on film, a practice that’s slowly starting to come back as artists start to invest more into their work.
The El Mal Querer era continued with iconic videos and performances to her hits like “Malamente” and “Pienso En Tu Mira” which used dense symbolism to go along with the poetic lyricism of her music. Some of the most striking images of her career so far include her riding a motorcycle while a matador tries to “tame” her as if she was a bull in a fighting ring or when she drowns herself in a bathroom in the “Bagdad” music video.
After a string of one off singles and collaborations all paired with excellent music videos, Rosalia recently returned with her third studio album, Motomami in 2022. Another concept album, she explores sex, fame, family and more in a more reggaetón and urban influenced double sided album. This time her music videos are more commercial and explicit but she doesn’t forget what makes her great to watch.
“Saoko” is the stand out so far, as Rosalia rap sings on a giant highway bridge, female stunt motorcycle drivers zip around her while the camera moves lightning quick at seemingly impossible angles. It’s a stunning piece of work on a relatively simple video idea.
The day the album came out, she followed up Motomami with a virtual concert on TikTok that she co-directed. The concert takes advantage of the medium and flips the screen constantly, making the viewers turn their phones in several directions to follow suit. It’s dynamic and engaging and shows how creative Rosalia is at adapting her music to different mediums.
Rosalia is just getting started, it feels inevitable that a full length film will come out with one of her albums in the future.
Lady Gaga
A Lady Gaga visual album just seems over due at this point more than anything else.
When she came onto the music scene in 2008 with her chart topping debut, The Fame, it seemed like the world revolved around only her at the time. Everything she did created conversation and moved the needle. Her first song “Just Dance” was a smash hit, but it was the second single, Poker Face that immediately set her apart on the pop scene. I think anyone in the world would be able to recognize the first image from the music video where Gaga rises out of a pool in a glistening black latex catsuit with a shimmering bejeweled mask covering her eyes. So many elements from that music video and Lady Gaga’s first era became so ubiquitous. Her long blond hair with blunt bangs, the hair bowtie, her avant-garde fashion, the triangles on her cheeks etc., all copied, parodied, sold and recreated in countless ways over the years.
She proved herself to be an adept storyteller with “Paparazzi” that same year, telling a campy, decadent story where Gaga plays a star hounded by the media even after she’s nearly killed and left paralyzed by her boyfriend.
One of the reasons Lady Gaga has been relevant for so long in pop culture to this day is because she commits 1000% to everything she does and isn’t scared to get ugly to get her message across. Whether that’s wearing a dress made of meat all night long for the VMAs or doing four outfit changes on the Met Gala red carpet, she will put her all into showing out even if the public couldn’t always understand her thought process.
While she’s calmed down (the camp comes out when necessary vs at all times) in more recent years and her star power has faded a tad as happens to any celebrity, she’s still a beloved pop star.
She ventured into film acting with the commercially successful A Star Is Born remake in 2018. The soundtrack she produced for the musical film was also a hit and earned her a Grammy and Oscar for “Shallow”. As she pivots to the golden screen, I always imagine she could take her efforts a step further and direct a full length project one day.