There’s a new music video for “Happy Endings,” the recent single from Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park featuring Iann Dior and UPSAHL. The single came out on Warner Records, which made it the first song to be released during a Non-Fungible Token auction by an artist on a major label.

The video was directed by PIX3LFACE, and involves a whole lot of visual effects, drawings, glitches, overlapping frames and transitions. Behind the busy editing are Shinoda, Dior and UPSAHL lip-synching the track in front of a brick wall. There’s a skate video aesthetic to the video, due to Shinoda running across rooftops and hopping over rails, plus some actual skateboarding footage.

“Happy Endings” is an especially catchy song, built on Iann Dior’s pre-chorus and UPSAHL’s two-part chorus, “Hey, at least in my mind/I’m feeling like I’m/The hero that saves me/There, I hold my head high/Get everything right/Delusional maybe/If I’m pretending/why not write happy endings/Where I’m better than we both know I could be, oh/Still At least in my mind/I’m feeling like I’m/The hero that saves me.” 

The song as a whole is about “kicking yourself for the things you say,” and Shinoda’s rapping touches on current topics such as the COVID-19 lockdown. As is true for many artists, quarantine heavily impacted Shinoda’s music throughout this past year. He turned to Twitch to work on music directly in collaboration with his fans and released three albums throughout the year, a trilogy called Dropped Frames, Vol. 1-3. Last year, he was also celebrating the 20th anniversary of Linkin Park’s debut album Hybrid Theory, and revealed a previously unreleased demo from 1999 called “She Couldn’t.”

Iann Dior was doing well on SoundCloud already, but really blew up after his collaboration with 24KGoldn, “Mood,” rose to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. His latest album I’m Gone came out in June 2020. UPSAHL is likewise a new artist, best known for her song “Drugs” and her massive popularity on TikTok. Her most recent solo single “STOP!” was released last month.

Photo credit: Shareef Ellis