Dumblonde are Aubrey O’Day and Shannon Bex, former Danity Kane members who picked up the girl group’s pieces and rose from its ashes stronger than before. They’ve been steadily, quietly releasing some of the year’s most fun pop singles, including the tender wub-wub jam “Tender Green Life,” co-written with Candice Pillay (featured on Dr. Dre’s Compton) and produced by r8dio.
In that track’s brand new music video — the first self-directed effort from dumblonde — the women take the form of life-sized paper dolls, flipping and contorting their bodies, their silhouettes peeling and dripping down the screen as the camera spirals around them.
O’Day told SPIN of the track and video:
When creating the lyrics for this song, we had envisioned two lovers running around a forest chasing each other, teasing each other with a hide and seek format of love. The lyrics are abstract and descriptive of the smell, taste, and sight of what these two lovers playing games with each other would see or feel in that environment. So when we sat down to create this visual, we wanted to take a completely opposite approach. As with every video we’ve really tried to stay away from our first ten ideas and push ourselves to create content that is out of our comfort zone and most importantly challenges the norm as that is what dumblonde is all about. We wanted to keep the look, technical style and approach of filming, editing, and coloring the video as left as possible. And somehow when we were done it all made sense and locked harmoniously in the exact way we wanted… which is everyone questioning what the hell did I just see? What does it mean? And hopefully I need to see it again.
