Romain Gavras. You should really know the name. If you don't, you have a treat ahead of you. Romain Gavras is the son of the hugely celebrated political thriller director Costa-Gavras, and he has a pretty amazing cinematic legacy of his own. Gavras directed the hallucinatory French crime movies Our Day Will Come and The World Is Yours, as well as the single-shot uprising epic Athena. But he's probably better known for directing some of the best, most indelible, most chaotic music videos of the last 20 years: DJ Mehdi's "Signatune," Justice's "Stress," M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls," Jamie xx's "Gosh." It's been a few years since the last Romain Gavras music video, but we've got one today, and it's a banger.
The French dance producer Surkin occasionally makes music under the name GENER8ION, and he's got a long association with Romain Gavras. Back in 2015, Surkin released the M.I.A. collab "The New International Sound (Part II)," and that had an amazing video. Gavras didn't direct it, but he was involved in the production. Before this morning, the most recent Gavras-directed music video was the one he did for GENER8ION's 2021 070 Shake collab "Neo Surf." Today, Surkin releases "Storm I" and "Storm II," his two new tracks with the Swedish rapper Yung Lean. ("Rapper" doesn't really seem like the right word for Yung Lean, but I don't know what else to call him. "Singer"? "Vocalist"? "Artist"? All of those feel wrong, too.) The two songs are pretty much just excuses for the new Romain Gavras-directed video, and that video is spectacular.
The latest Romain Gavras film is called Sacrifice, and it doesn't have an American release date yet, but it does have a cast that includes Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Evans, Salma Hayek, and Vincent Cassel, as well as Charli XCX and Yung Lean. Yung Lean makes his acting debut in that film, and he's also the star of the "Storm" video, which runs for seven and a half minutes and includes both parts of the song.
The clip takes place at a fancy British boarding school in the near future. Yung Lean plays the charismatic, chaotic bully who seems to run the school. There's no dialog, but everything seems to happen in a Lord Of The Flies world where adults simply do not exist. (Yung Lean may be a 29-year-old neck-tatted Swedish quasi-rapper, but he makes a perfectly plausible teenage dirtbag.) The video isn't really about narrative. As with so many other Gavras projects, it's all about visceral motion — especially the huge dance sequence that ends the clip. I love this fucking shit. Watch it below.
Musically, the two parts of "Storm" are a cool electro-rock hybrid. The sound is a cool complement to the more way-out stuff that Yung Lean has been doing musically in recent months. If you just want to hear both parts of "Storm" without the video, you can do that below.
The "Storm" single is out now on Iconoclast Music.
