Yannis & The Yaw share new video for latest EP cut ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’

Having emerged as one of recent times’ most exciting collaborative projects, Yannis & The Yaw - the joint venture of Foals’ Yannis Philippakis and the late, great drummer Tony Allen - have now shared a new video for ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’, the latest track to lifted from their forthcoming EP ‘Lagos Paris London’ (out on 30th August). 

Built around an Afrobeat-influenced loop and thunderous instrumentals, the single follows previous cuts ‘Walk Through Fire’ and ‘Under The Strikes’, and lyrically looks at the apocalypse-level threat of the current climate crisis. Created by Yannis and regular Foals collaborator Kit Monteith, its new visualiser embraces the use of (often controversial) AI technology to capture the dystopian, post-apocalyptic world evoked by the song’s lyrics.

Speaking about their creative process, Kit has explained that “Yannis and I liked the idea of trying to show the world around him shifting and changing in strange ways, which linked to the lyrical themes, so I started to develop the technique that we’ve now come to call AI Stop Motion. The visual effect involves the individual manipulation of every single frame, of which there are 25 per second, so it’s a very labour intensive process. 

“For ‘Rain Can’t Reach Us’ we decided to use it to symbolise potential futures for London, with desert sands rising up to engulf buildings and storm clouds raging in the skies above the city. I soon discovered that the pace of change registered by the eye seemed to connect with Tony Allen’s style of drumming; all the ghost notes and extra accents in his style were able to be picked out by the visual process and it was a wonderful way to highlight his playing and presence.”

Check out the video here: