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Music

Seriously, is Dessert’s “Back Around, Devil” the Greatest Music Video of 2016?

You need to watch this. You need to watch it all, and repeatedly.
Daisy Jones
London, GB

In years to come, 2016 will go down as a freak accident. It will be the year that America did or didn't choose a giant orange sack as its President; the year that Nigel Farage floated down the Thames in a flotilla, shouting at Bob Geldof, before telling the UK to leave Europe and the UK listened to him; the year in which we all gathered around a webcam to watch a puddle in Newcastle; the year in which David actual Bowie died.

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It will also be the year we were blessed with The Life of Pablo and Lemonade and Coloring Book and Black Star and Freetown Sound and Endless and Blond(e). It will be the year of so much iconic musical output that we couldn't keep up, until every event, every moment made, and every word spoken, eventually invoked nothing but a cursory glance and a 'meh' from us all. It will be the year in which the smaller, more beautiful creations became lost, like tiny rubies in a sea of glistening diamonds.

This is where Dessert's video for "Back Around, Devil" comes in, because it is undoubtedly one of the greatest audio-visual creations of the year, but you won't have heard about it when it came out two weeks ago because of the aforementioned white noise. It is only five minutes long, but those five minutes are glorious and cinematic and sinister and stylish, and will lodge themselves into your brain in such a way that you will wake up in the middle of the night and see it projected onto the inner surfaces of your mind.

If you don't recognise the protagonist of this video, his name is Manny Yarbrough (nicknamed "Tiny") and at 700 pounds, he was known as the world's heaviest athlete (he was a sumo wrestler). He died late last year – of a heart attack at 51 – and once said he felt like "a prisoner in [his] own body". "Back Around, Devil" was filmed shortly before his death, and watching this video, as he drifts off into the sky in a multi-coloured hot air balloon, or tries to exist while being wrapped in and attached to blood-soaked ropes, feels unsettling in light of what we know now. Also, the song is like all your most emotional feels mushed into one sticky web of electronics, and one of the most imaginative debuts we've heard in time.

Watch the whole thing below: