(Photo Credit: Raymond Flotat)

Chillwave band Neon Indian has released their most recent music video “Annie”. The video can be viewed below:

The video has a VHS-style warped filter applied to it. Glitches, fuzziness, and skips abound in a video that looks like it was discovered in the VHS section of a flea market. All of the colors are highly saturated, yet blurry and distorted. Low-fi, karaoke-like lyrics fill the bottom of the screen throughout the video. The video concerns an obsessed protagonist hunting down his former lover Annie. He barely misses her at every turn, and he calls her constantly, always getting her answering machine. The protagonist eventually goes to the police for help in finding her, but finds little help there, as the police sketches are all bizarre pictures of cartoon characters. He then gets beaten by the police. At the end of the video, the protagonist goes on a talk show and urges everyone watching to look out for Annie. The video splices in actual concert footage of Neon Indian alongside its stylized stalker plot.

Fetishized tributes to the 80’s/early 90’s have become increasingly common in recent years. In music, the semi-ironic genre of vaporwave fixates itself on the bittersweet nature of 90’s nostalgia. Additionally, recent pop records like Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion and Skylar Spence’s Prom King try to invoke bubblegum pop 80’s nostalgia. In movies and television, parodies such as Kung Fury and The Eric Andre Show satirize and stylize the tropes of the era. In video games, Far Cry: Blood Dragon and the Hotline Miami series present hyper-violent neon 80’s action.