Today marks the XL Recordings release of So It Goes, the first major album by New York hip-hop collective Ratking, so it’s perfect timing for the album’s first single to land a music video. Directed by Eric K. Yue, the video matches the noise-rap track’s intensity, which, combined, works as an audio-visual ode to the bustling but bacchaeic Canal Street. Frontman Wiki and co. deliver the song’s dark verses in dimly lit spaces across Lower Manhattan. The camera’s perspective switches between handheld views and surrounding shots, with scenes in emptied, eerie apartments followed by Wiki alone in a parking lot somwhere close to the Manhattan Bridge, running through references to his hometown. We see a late-night train fly by, and the neon lights of Chinatown after dark shine, and all we can hear is the crew-leader’s narration: “Come down, Canal, a little hustle, a lot of doubt.” Now the album’s billing as “a modern-day portrait of New York City” makes a lot more sense.
Ratking Pay Dark Tribute to Manhattan in ‘Canal’ Video
