TOYS - Hey Boy

TOYS are a criminally little-known Parisian duo who make beautiful music that's almost always accompanied by beautiful visuals. Past tracks have seen videos set around various locations in Paris, but this most recent offering, Hey Boy – directed by Louis de Caunes – serves up slices of New York City's various subcultures, from skating and street art to breakdancing and basketball, in stunningly up-close-and-personal black-and-white.

The song itself is a gloriously intense haze, a meander through an early-morning mist of synths, evoking the atmosphere of the laid-back yet quietly skilful pursuits shown in the video. Vocal samples rain down with increasing frequency amidst the dreamlike canopy of the song, pockmarked with gunshot snares and burrowed through with a surging gloss of sub-bass, till white noise synths take over. It's soulful and sparse, yet hard and noisy – the perfect evocation of life in the city as shown by the video. TOYS are practically a multimedia project because, as in this instance, the music and their videos seem always like an inseparable coupling.