andy shauf

Andy Shauf has delivered a delightfully surreal new video for his song “Early To The Party.” The track is from Shauf’s critically heralded album The Party, which Stereogum called “a lovely, luxuriant thing” and the Independent described as “a baroque-pop exercise with echoes of Seventies smarties like Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Steely Dan.”

The new clip, directed by Luke McCutcheon & Michael Yablonski (Andrew Bird, Young Galaxy), depicts an offbeat and surreal party attended by an collection of eccentric Twin Peaks-like characters. They socialize with one another, dance alone, and eventually engage in a strange party game which ends on a both poignant and unnerving note.

Party music, via Andy Shauf‘s “Quite Like You.”  The new clip was animated and directed by Chad VanGaalen, who has recently made stunning videos for artists like Tanya Tagaq and Shad, Holy Fuck and Daniel Romano.

The collaboration from Shauf and VanGaalen takes viewers into a meta world of awkward parties. Bizarre-looking “party mutants” roam through rooms interacting with each other — controlled, we learn, by zoned-out gamers on couches. At the heart of it, though, there’s a totally endearing alien love story.

“Andy’s story was really easy to get inside of and hang out for a while, so I just sat right here in my drawing chair and decided what type of fashion the party mutants would be wearing,” VanGaalen said in a statement. “Tennis ball pedestal helmets will obviously be available soon-ish.”