Queer liberation and a “yassified” Falkor come together in visually dazzling music videos by Disiniblud

It’s not every day that one finds themselves with a strange dragon’s head in their inbox. The dragon head in It's Nice That’s inbox is called Grandma, a strangely sad knock-off of Falkor from The Neverending Story, lovingly created for a series of music videos by the visual team behind a new alternative electronic project, Disiniblud. Led by familiar faces in the glitch pop genre, Rachika Nayar and Nina Keith spoke to us about the off-kilter and endearing visuals surrounding their self-titled debut album.

“Basically there’s this viral Twitter image of a replica Falkor in a garage,” says Rachika. “Something so fantastical in such a mundane place – I thought she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” Wanting to go to the real garage where this dejected Falkor lay and take photos for the album, their label Domino Records suggested to create their own creature to avoid copyright infringement, resulting in what Rachika describes as a “yassified” Falkor who is “serving sadly”.

Grandma is the mythical mascot of Disiniblud’s music videos, appearing in their collaborative song It’s Change, featuring the legendarily noisy Willy Siegel who provides choruses of chirps and hollers, clipped guitars and delays that shudder and whir just like the visuals – a kinetic frenzy of blurred photographs that feature the obscured duo and Grandma, looking slightly awed or despaired, in the garage. “That garage had this haunted energy and a weird gravitational pull to it,” says Nina. “It felt so perfect the moment we set up the creature in there it just clicked. I remember we couldn’t stop laughing.”

The centrepiece of Disiniblud’s new album is the lead single, also named Disiniblud, which reverses the obscurity of It’s Change, instead choosing to get completely naked. “We shot this video with an all-trans cast and mostly trans crew, in Los Angeles County on 10 June (under the strawberry full moon in Sagittarius),” says director Chris Osborn. “I wanted to preserve the light as it hit our bodies, hit our eyes, hit this film, under these particular conditions.” The video features queer liberation right down to the bare skin of it all, to “prove that we were here, that we have been here, and we will always be here, forever”, representing a variety of body types not often seen in media, never mind music videos. “We wanted to have naked trannies running around free yet possessed,” says Rachika. “Grandma is the overlord so she had to be there.” Naturally!

Inspired by the music video for Gobbedligook by the similarly inventive group Sigur Rós and the 1977 gay manifesto The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions by Larry Mitchell, Disiniblud present an utopian and green image of queer communal living focused on sexual liberation and anti-assimilationism, an alternate reality where all are free to roam under the watchful gaze of a strange caniform-esque dragon. “When I look at everything we’ve made together there’s no squandered free will. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to be kind of insane,” says Nina. The song itself borrows wonderfully from friend-of-the-duo Will Wiesenfeld in the instrumentation, filled with eclectic percussion and pitched-up notes that glitter around its entire five minutes.

Next for Disiniblud is “perhaps a TikTok of us doing the ‘Apple Dance’ one and a half years too late,” but mostly solo projects and the next Disiniblud album. “My primary investment is always in connecting with brown people and/or queer people obviously,” says Rachika. “But I’m also always reaching for some plane of possibility and becoming and otherness that is harbored within everyone – not just within people who happen to identify a certain way right now.” No matter what it will be, the duo are crafting music and visuals that feel just like the maligned majesty of a scruffy garage dragon – if that’s your thing, then you won’t get it anywhere else.