Queens-born Korean producer Yaeji unveiled her revved-up mixtape What We Drew last week. To celebrate her highly-anticipated release, Yaeji debuted an animated lyric video to the track “When I Grow Up” as a reflection on the themes of her early childhood.
Animated and directed by Luis Yang, the visual moves in alignment with Yaeji’s jarring synth beat. Each component of the animation somehow ties in with the theme of Yaeji’s mixtape. Dancing onions and flashing video game controllers float around the producer’s outlined alter-ego.
In a statement, Yaeji said the track is an acute reflection on her childhood: “‘WHEN I GROW UP’ is a song of two perspectives talking with each other. one is me from my childhood, wondering what it would be like when i become an adult. the other is me as an adult, breaking the truth to young me,” she said.
In a recent interview with Vice‘s Garage Magazine, Yaeji discussed her draw to visual art as a medium, which can be seen through her “When I Grow Up” video:
“I’ve always been way more comfortable with visual art for a very long period of my life,” she said. “I think the earliest memory I have is when I was four years old: I was painting a lot, and decided then that I would become a visual artist when I grew up, and I stayed pretty consistently on that path until college. I’m still really comforted by it. I would say my visual art making practice is really similar to music making in a lot of ways. I’m more of a process-based artist, and I’m really frantic and messy sometimes, and abstract and expressive. Often you have to just let it all out that way and then clean it up and organize it later, and understand the bigger picture of the messaging of it.”
Watch Yaeji’s “When I Grow Up” lyric video above.
What We Drew is out now via XL. Get it here.