Pop-rock quartet OK Go have released their first album in over a decade, And the Adjacent Possible. From the left, Dan Konopka, Andy Ross, Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind.Piper Ferguson/Supplied
Since 2006, when they released the single-take video for Here it Goes Again, OK Go has been known for their playful, mind-bending music videos – featuring everything from treadmills to zero gravity, drones and even a Rube Goldberg machine. But the music video for A Stone Only Rolls Downhill – the lead single from the first Ok Go album in over a decade, And the Adjacent Possible – is more than just a marketing vehicle. As mesmerizing as the new video is, it’s also the product of emotions not generally associated with the pop-rock quartet. Like despair, for example, and cynicism.
The first words that Damian Kulash sings on the track are the giveaway, notwithstanding the sweetly hopeful melody that underpins the lyrics: “I wish that I could say it would all be all right”.
In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Kulash said that he has a feeling of “living in split screen,” especially when it comes to parenting – he’s the father to twin six-year-olds – because he has to hold back from telling his kids how messed up the world is. “But I also don’t want to lie to them,” he added. “They can’t grow up deluded, but I don’t want to ruin their lives with despair right now, either.”
That sentiment – that idea that we’re all living in a kind of split screen – was the creative jumping off point for the new video, although the cynicism is again a bit obscured, this time by a kaleidoscope of colour and complex choreography. Apple CEO Tim Cook shared the “incredible” iPhone-fuelled creation to his nearly 15 million followers on X, but the fact remains that there’s always been a kind of tonal sleight-of-hand inherent to Ok Go’s art, if one simply looks beyond – or beneath – the upbeat tunes and elaborate videography.
Kulash, for one, admits his lyrics tend to fall on the darker, more melancholic end of the spectrum, a truth that especially comes to the fore across the 12 tracks of And the Adjacent Possible (the North American tour in support of which includes two shows in Vancouver in June). “A lot of this record is a kind of intensified version of something that’s run through our lyrics for decades,” he says, although he adds they did sneak in some moments of hope – or pleas for something better – too. “It’s really paradoxical. You’re writing prayers for yourself. Like: ‘It’s gonna be alright! Oh god, it’s not gonna be alright.‘”
OK GO Color_Plexie_419-LGPiper Ferguson/Supplied
Kulash, who turns 50 later this year, acknowledges that being a parent brings even more urgency to that emotional tug-of-war between despair and joy: “It makes what the adults have done to the world harder to ignore.” Fittingly, more than one song on Ok Go’s new album addresses fatherhood. In Love, a soaring anthem, Kulash sings: “In this grand ballroom of nothingness, your hand so warm with somethingness, we whirl and twirl – and music’s invented again.”
Album opener Impulse Purchase, an electronic dreamscape that’s musically reminiscent of Kraftwerk, laments the algorithms that control what we see and how we interact with it all: “Now, as a practical matter, it’s pointless to address you directly here / Any probabilistic adjustments will dissolve in the sea of the everything-everyone-everywhere-ever-has-done that you swallowed before.”
All of which is to say: The arrival of And the Adjacent Possible finds the nearly 30-year-old band embracing all the weirdness and complexities of middle age and the world-weariness it entails. This is definitely not the same band that once went viral for dancing on treadmills with the wiry energy of over-caffeinated twentysomethings. And though Ok Go’s new music is more cerebral and genre-hopping than ever, there are at least two constants about the group that remain unchanged.
First, like their biggest videos, the band’s new record is once again full of surprises, with songs that zig where you expect them to zag. Nothing lands quite where you think it will – which, of course, is exactly the point. Chasing surprise has always been this band’s North Star. Second, Kulash remains refreshingly unable to talk about his music in clean, quotable soundbites. Interviews with him tend to be discursive, topical grab bags that tumble through philosophy, art, science, and the slippery nature of meaning. The new album’s title, for example, is taken from a phrase popularized by biologist Stuart Kauffman, whose work on the evolution of complex systems has focused on the way innovation and progress happen at the edges of what’s currently possible.
“There’s this sort of recursive cart-before-the-horse type of logic to all this, which is that the only way something can be great to you – the person making it – is if it surprises you in some way,” Kulash says. “I think a lot of the reason that people’s first albums or second albums are so full of energy and are so inspired is because the first time someone discovers the same three chords that are in half the Beatles’ songs – when you first hear them, you play them differently. Because you’re like: Oh my god, what is this? You know? But once you understand the pattern, there’s no way to get that same sense of discovery back.
“What I felt lucky with, about this record, was that there were things to discover that felt fresh to us.”
Damian Kulash’s three favourite OK Go music videos
For OK Go, music videos aren’t just a way to promote a song – they’re a vital part of the band’s creative DNA.
“This is a weird and wonderful corner of the world to have found ourselves in,” Kulash says, reflecting on the band’s visual legacy. “We were lucky to stumble into this niche, where thinking of art projects that are challenging and inspiring became something of a brand for us.”
In his Globe interview, Kulash talked about the ones he considers the best.
“WTF?” (2009)
“The ones that stick out to me are mostly the ones that haven’t had a huge cultural impact, because to me they’re like little gems,” Kulash says. “The video for WTF? was perhaps the lowest production budget of any of them. We rented a studio for a day, it was a green screen studio, and we just got a whole bunch of really brightly colored things at the dollar store and had a friend of ours help us make some crazy clothes.”
With a single frame-stacking video effect and a lot of creative energy, the band conjured a hypnotic visual loop that felt more like digital art than a typical music video. Kulash: “What I love when I see that video is, it’s just four dudes in a room.”
“Here It Goes Again” (2006)
Of course, there’s that video. The one with the treadmills. The one that made the entire internet do a double-take.
“The treadmill video changed not just the course of our career, but it was, like, the hinge that moved everything from MTV to YouTube,” Kulash says. “The culture change it was part of can only happen once.”
Beyond its iconic status, Here It Goes Again also marked a turning point – not just for OK Go, but for how music videos could live and thrive online. “Having that kind of effect on the world – it’s very different than just having made something that feels like an elegant poem,” Kulash says.
“All Is Not Lost” (2011)
Unlike the treadmill video that went mega-viral, All Is Not Lost was a collaboration with the dance company Pilobolus that’s equal parts surreal and stirring.
“I think All Is Not Lost is really, really emotional,” Kulash says. “When you see these beautiful bodies rolling across the screen, I actually get a teary feeling inside of me. When a piece of art can turn from pixels into emotions that way… man. It does something to me.”