Before collaborating with YouTube Premium for a new documentary this Spring, left-field pop project WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA teamed up with compatriots yahyel for a song titled “Survive Tokyo”. The number itself originally popped up on streaming services late last year, but the two artists shared a new video for the number earlier today. Watch it below:
The clip finds yahyel lead vocalist Shun Ikegai and WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA’s KOM_I singing in front of a model of Tokyo Tower that is surrounded by various miniature skyscraper ruins. The first half focuses mostly on their faces, but it doesn’t take long for everything to go red — really red — and shots of the pair being inter-spliced with images of burned-out-looking salarymen. But whatever distress was weighing down on those suit-clad workers vanishes in the final stretch, wherein they lock hands together around Ikegai and KOM_I to sway back and forth. It’s a heck of a closing set piece.
Besides being a semi-surreal shot, it also works as a solid metaphor for “Survive Tokyo’s” lyrical theme. As relayed in an interview with Japanese site Qetic, this number reflects the fact Ikegai and KOM_I are basically of the same generation and have similar experiences of the city as they grew up. It can be a nifty place to be, but also one that drains you as you go about daily life, best represented by the exhausted faces of office workers in the clip (or, like, streaming out of any tall building downtown around 6 p.m.).
Learn more about WEDNESDAY CAMPANELLA and yahyel while you are at it! And stay tuned for more news from both artists, who are set for a busy 2019.