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Best Driving Song: Rather Be – Clean Bandit ft Jess Glynne

Like OK Go, English quartet Clean Bandit have a penchant for self-producing simple yet effective music videos that get people talking. Unlike OK Go, however, Clean Bandit couple their videos with songs that aren’t rubbish.

When we first featured them back in August 2011 with the video for early single Telephone Banking, they were utilizing an often under-used musical tool in the shape of a children’s Sega Mega Drive orchestra, while the video for A&E featured a giant gold snake creeping across the streets of London.

In the video for their top twenty single, the techno-meets-classical hybrid Mozart’s House, the band created an intricate stop-motion visual accompaniment, while Dust Clears soundtracked a short film inspired by Walter Raeburn’s painting, The Skating Minister.

While their current single Rather Be (co-written with Jimmy Napes, who helped create Disclosure’s Latch) continues their love for mixing uplifting, classical-inspired violin and featherlight dance, the video – premiered here – is tinged with a darker undercurrent, as the band’s Jack Patterson explains:

“[The song] is quite romantic, but the video is about a Japanese fan of the band that becomes delirious and has hallucinations of band members and our logo appearing unexpectedly in her daily life as a chef.”

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well for our poor heroine.

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