Looking at a girl trying to repeatedly burst open a wooden desk with a hammer, and another girl taping someone lying facedown on the ground, almost feels like watching Kim Kardashian’s Santa Baby 2024 Christmas video all over again, with pockets of dysfunctionality in every corner. Albeit TOKiMONSTA’s Feel It (feat. grouptherapy) is psychedelia fuelled with saturated colours and concrete as their stage.
The lyrics go, “I need those 808s, bump it ‘til we see the sun”. Perhaps it’s the everlasting influence of Brat summer, that we’re still hearing – or perhaps noticing the fact that we’ll be bumping that and paying attention to it for a while longer. Feel It releases off TOKiMONSTA’s up-coming Eternal Reverie album due in March, after all.
She’s a stellar beat maker and it shows. When TOKiMONSTA was learning piano as a child, she thoroughly disliked the process – playing the entire composition, and not just the parts she liked was not enjoyable. Her triumph came from learning production in her college dorm, and getting into beat communities in LA, the electronic producer is known best for her development of beats. House beats on Feel It paired with Jadagrace from grouptherapy’s reverberating voice emerging from the depths, give it a particularly atmospheric quality – which both grouptherapy and TOKiMONSTA are known for, often subduing the sharp enunciations of hip-hop and rhythms into softer dance music. They plunge us into ecstatic sounds one would hear at a house party at 3am.
Everyone is young and an archetype in the video – the college student eating chips and making a mess, the obsessive roommate cleaning it up, the action figures from video games who seem stuck in time. Then, we’re hit with the familiar depiction of a trip as the blurry figures distort into kaleidoscopic colours, hurtling around the screen. The music too pauses in between its fluid beats and switches to the fast-paced, as the lyrics change to “This bitch is jumpin’, my heart just got right back to pumpin’” simulating the lows and highs of partying. TOKiMONSTA and grouptherapy’s control and release of beats and lyricality is indeed the best part of the song.