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Music

It's All Net Art and Palm Trees in Realism's "Reason Never Came to Tell"

The Danish duo's new video is like being in Hawaii and Windows '98 at the same time.

So yeah, we're all well-versed in this thingy called The Internet, which means we've encountered at least one Tumblr artist using graphics from Microsoft Paint as proof that art school was worth it, which means we've heard of this whole 'net art' thing. In a way, net art is kind of cute: all larger artistic agendas aside, it harkens back to an innocent time—a time when playing Minesweeper on your mom's hideous beige PC meant the world to you. Luckily, Realism stirs up those feelings of net art-induced nostalgia with their tropical vacay of a video, "Reason Never Came to Tell."

Realism is a project by Lasse Bækby Buch and Andreas Murga Thomsen described as "vaporwavish psychpop". Kay, we're not even going to pretend like we know what "vaporwavish" means, but we dig the vibe of the word anyway. And hey, we dig the vibe of the track too! It's this lo-fi, faux-80s kinda deal with some carefully-crafted kitsch in the vocals and a delightful lil' groove behind it. Think the soundtrack to some B-Movie RomCom from the 80s, or maybe the kind of tune that really should have been in Weekend at Bernie's.

The video digs into the vibe even further: it's a window into a computer screen characterized by an old school Internet aesthetic and trippy graphics that swim across the screen. Add a lil' palm tree here, a lil' shag carpet there and you've got yourself a campy, art school-certified dream of a tropical vacation—if it took place inside the Windows '98 OS, that is.