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Music

Lil West's New Video Is as Eerie and Unsettling as His Wild Raps

The teenaged Delaware rapper continues his embrace of the surreal in a clip for "Bit My Tongue Now My Mouth Bleeding" and "marry me."

Over the past couple of years, Lil West has proven himself one of rap's most open-minded experimenters. Both on his proper releases—like last year's LW17—and a steady stream of loosies posted to his Soundcloud account, the 19-year-old has adopted the position of rap's Delawarean alien, offering interstellar transmissions that refract glitchy electronic music, bleeding emo, and thunderous trap tropes through the unique prism of his perspective. It's wild stuff, and today he's back with something new, a visual for tracks both new and old.

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Produced by Pinkslip and directed by Shane J Smith—who's not that Shane Smith, but he does work for VICE (it's confusing to us too)—the new clip's a surreal accompaniment to LW17's grungy intro "Bit My Tongue Now My Mouth Bleeding" and an unreleased track called "marry me" from an upcoming collaborative EP with the genre-agnostic producer Dmac. Mirroring the psychedelic darkness of both tracks, the clip's a lonely journey through abandoned landscapes with both West and a companion slowly accumulating bruises and abrasions in mysterious ways. It's eerie and unsettling, just like the songs are, and only gets weirder as things go on, as West inhabits some dark netherworld and starts glowing.

So yeah, you're going to want to watch that clip up above. And check out the rest of his music if you haven't, there really isn't much else like it.