Today, Yung Lean is sharing a new video from his latest album Starz, released May 15th via YEAR0001. Directed by Anton Tammi, "Outta My Head" is a visually striking film that shows the raw and emotional moments from the life of a melancholic character facing loneliness. Led by a powerful performance from Yung Lean (Jonatan Leandoer), the dark mood and documentary style of the video is a nod to the Scandinavian dogma genre and showcases beauty colliding with brutality in an intense and painful way. The video is the fourth visual from the Starz universe following "My Agenda," "Boylife in EU," and "Violence + Pikachu" and arrives after his innovative performance from the back of a truck in April.
Speaking on the video, Tammi says: "I had wanted to work with Jonatan (Yung Lean) for years... We met in Stockholm finally this year 2020. As I got stuck to the city due to the corona-situation, we started to talk more and more about this character of the lonely man. Jonatan knows a lot about movies, and we have a similar taste around certain themes and styles of film making, aesthetic and humor. For 'Outta My Head' video, the big inspiration was the dogme95 film making style. Think of the Riget TV series or Festen by Thomas Vinterberg, or Dancer In The Dark etc... The attempt to strip down all artificial movie making tricks and focus purely on the story and the acting. I think it's rare to do a music video in this style. But We loved the challenge and went full on in shooting everything in one room hand held doc style. There was only three people in the room: myself, our DP Erik Henriksson and Jonatan. I think Jonatan is a talented actor and me and him share the same attitude towards improvisation, and how to get into character. I really think it shows in our video - his acting is so real, you think almost if this really happened to him."
Called "hopeful and liberating" by The New Yorker and described by The FADER as "some of the most compelling music of his hip-hop career," Starz is Lean's seventh full-length following 2018's Poison Ivy. Much like Lean's overall catalog, the new album feels almost impossibly cohesive. In part, that's thanks to production entirely from longtime collaborator whitearmor - they kept the sessions intimate and secluded, recording partly in an old ballet hall in the Swedish countryside. But this is an album only Lean could make, and really only at this point, as a young veteran, with a sound and career that's well-entrenched globally but still doggedly, even perplexingly, on its own planet.