Nogari directs a breathtaking promo for Tove Lo's new release - a love story with a difference. Shot in Mexico City, the video for Borderline sees an exhausted crash test dummy come to life and kidnap Tove Lo - who he has become obsessed with, having seen her calendar every day in the crash lab. From then on, the video transitions into an unusual love story, in which Lo falls in love with him and his criminal ways, until an explosive climax on the run from the police, which brings the video full circle. The dusty, gritty aesthetic and retrofuturistic nostalgia in the imagery is perfectly inkeeping with the artist's style at this point in her career. With Nogari's direction to elevate it to this level, it will no doubt have a lot of buzz around it when it comes to award season.

The return of Ashnikko with her "angriest song" also heralds a breathtaking comeback to music videos by Saam Farahmand, creating a clinical pop-horror as deliriously subversive and transgressive as anything he has done before. It’s sick.You Make Me Sick! clocks in at just over two minutes, and in that time Farahmand establishes a scenario worthy of Cronenberg in a slick pop video aesthetic, inviting the viewer into repeated surges of disbelief. What is being piped in tubes between the orifices of Ashnikko and her followers? What is that murky liquid rising up around Ash and her dancers?The artist and director are in perfect harmony in their drive to create art that crosses over the line of good taste, and will generate a good deal of actual disgust, even from those who admire it greatly. It’s a brilliant smashing through into something new and dangerous, an undiluted, confrontational, controversial visualisation of raw pain.“I’ve decided to come back with my angriest, most cathartic song to date,” the singer has said of the new song in an accompanying statement. “My own personal rage room for me to smash my plates.”Saam Farahmand has added: "The video is about discovering toxicity, the purging of toxicity and the defiant audacity of revelry and spectacle within it. I continue to explore the collision between raw, uncomfortable human experience, and the seductive spectacle of pop culture."

Joshua Stocker directs a beautiful and moving promo for Guvna B's autobiographical story of injustice, Bridgeland Road. Through a series of powerful vignettes - captured in outstanding cinematography by DoPs Adam Singodia and Luke Dryden - Stocker's video provides an atmospheric visual context for the London-born rapper, author and broadcaster's reflections upon his life following an unprovoked racially motivated attack, which he reported to the police but who dropped the case four months after the incident.Spurred on by Emmy award-winning actress and writer Michaela Coel - whose voicemail appears in the track around the halfway mark - Guvna B (aka Isaac Borquaye) reveals more about the attack and its subsequent handling by the police and legal process, while the monochrome video establishes the artist's world with artistic resonance. Stocker sets the scene with well-crafted scenes of the place where the artist grew up, detailing normal daily life, lazy afternoons and meetups with friends. But then representations of the harrowing attack and its aftermath, start to intrude while Guvna's heartfelt performance becomes the heart of the video.A director and photographer with considerable experience in bringing choreography to the screen - as in his excellent Olafur Arnalds video for Zero - Joshua Stocker's uses all that experience, including movement direction of his on-screen extras, to craft the stream of images.That makes this piece, over five minutes long, a mesmerising experience.

Tanu Muino brings us the first outstanding British music video event of 2023 with Sam Smith's unabashed, splendidly theatrical and joyfully outrageous video for I'm Not Here To Make Friends.Exuberant, eccentric, and defiantly brazen, this sees Sam Smith dispensing with any last vestige of previous public incarnations and embracing their queer superstar status with gusto - but also with a healthy self-knowing nod and a wink.Sam arrives by helicopter to a historic countryside manor, joining a gregarious crowd to engage is an extravagant costume party for the ages, over an inspirational sample of RuPaul before the disco beat of this surefire smash kicks in. And eyebrows are soon being raised...There is dancing. There are some extraordinary outfits. There's rowdy behaviour. And there is some very suggestive things going on, including a scene that may possibly be inspired by Frankie Goes To Hollywood's video for Relax!Throughout is the stunning array of costumes and looks, and Sam's playful and sexy performance, which dazzles in every vignette. They are clearly having the time of their lives. Bringing together so many different layers and inspirations - including a knowing nod to Steven Klein's promo for Gaga's Alejandro - the video oozes self-love and an excitable confidence, and is the perfect release to complement Gloria, Smith's just-released new album.It just ticks all the boxes it's supposed to tick - and that is really down to the genius of Tanu Muino. She just knows what a pop video like this should do, and achieved it, from start to finish.

Aidan Zamiri takes an iconoclastic leap into new territory, and shows that the stuffy British legal drama is ripe for reinvention in his wonderful video for indie duo Jockstrap.The video for the band's splendid Greatest Hits takes on a familiar story throughout pop and rock history, when fame and success leads to in-fighting, legal wrangling, and ends up in court in a blaze of publicity. The genius of the video is how Zamiri gives this story a properly rock 'n roll treatment.Princess Julia - DJ, writer, "beloved mother of London’s underground" (The Gentlewoman), whose first video appearance was in Visage's Fade To Grey - and actor John Foley are superbly cast as the feuding rock couple at the centre of the story, around whom a courtroom epic plays out, delivered through the prism of a lo-fi, trashy, surreal version of Court TV. As a continuous scrolling news tickertape relays details of the somewhat incomprehensible legal case, witnesses arrive and testify and legal officials of the courtroom mouth lyrics of the song. And the portrait by the courtroom artist bursts into full animation.With an unfeasibly large cast of characters and cameos - including Don Letts as a witness and Jamie xx on a legal team - this is a satire on fame and media frenzy that hits the mark without ever losing its sense of fun or cool.In fact, in our judgement, it's supercool.

Colin Solal Cardo follows his hypnotic promo for Kimbra with something much more down to Earth, in this breezy, uplifting piece for Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds. The video for Easy Now features Milly Alcock (of House Of Dragons fame), and sees her character move from despair to euphoria, as she tears up the streets of London.Watched over by Gallagher himself - who chills on the sidelines, in a brief yet very welcome cameo - the video is anchored by a wonderful performance from Alcock, as she jumps on cars, disrupts groups of pigeons and eventually does a victorious run down the middle of the road, full of glee. A poignant concept which cements the fact that music has the ability to transcend, elevate and pull you out of yourself on the darkest of days.

Tom Emmerson directs a thoroughly entertaining promo for AntsLive, with the London rapper performing his latest track from a surprising location - the Italian Alps.With the engaging style previously on show in Emmerson's UKMVA-nominated video for Tweakin, Ants tears it up across glorious mountainous vistas - riding on horseback, hanging out with the locals, including the goats, wooing the farmer's daughter, and hitching a ride on the side of a local fire engine - for Number One Candidate. The brilliantly surprising location for a grime track is a bold yet ingenious move, captured in vibrant cinematography on colour film by Isaac Eastgate.But Ants is always the star of the show, oozing cheeky personality and a sense of fun, even while sharing the screen with quite possibly the greatest goat of all time. And he also shows impressive horse riding skills, performing the track while riding his steed in a full gallop. "We poured months of hard work into making this one a reality," explains Tom Emmerson. "No major label. No established production company. All off our own backs."Ants learned to ride a horse in ten days for it and we spent two weeks filming in the mountains. This was the experience of a lifetime."So happy to have it out in the world. We're on the edge of vitality right now and hoping it goes all the way."

Ewan Jones Morris takes us back into the marvellous world of cut-up montage animation - and then adds a modern tech spin for good measure - for South London indie band Hotel Lux.The video for the rather excellent Points Of View is a surreal mash of performance and textures, with a nostalgic zine aesthetic, courtesy of the technique of mixing cut-out stills with lo-fi video of the band performing, and other paper elements, that Jones Morris executed with the help of Louise Mason and William Reid. Together the three of them run a 'collage club' at State51, Hotel Lux's label, called Sticky Pleasure, where people hang out and make collages. So the video became a logical extension of that project.But as well as creating animating in the old-fashioned stop-frame way, Jones Morris also employed some AI to extend the capacity of the form. The effect is to super-charge the animation without disrupting its essential character.So body parts and landscapes entangle, faces crumple and eyeballs appear at every corner, in this wonderful, whimsical piece of work. "The video is pretty straightforward, low budget fare: lads, guitars and paper collage," explains Jones Morris. "But despite it's lo-fi DIY aesthetic some of the imagery is created by feeding collages into AI algorithms and seeing how the images are reinterpreted."I guess it's partly an attempt to utilise some of these already ubiquitous AI image generators in a very handmade, lo-fi way."