YouTube/Warner
Ed Sheeran‘s new album, No.6 Collaborations Project, is out now. As its name suggests, each of its 15 tracks features the artist, who is in way more of Yesterday than you’d think, teaming up with a different A-list artist. Ahead of the album’s release, we heard his collabs with Justin Bieber, Chance the Rapper and PnB Rock, Khalid, Yebba, and Bruno Mars and Chris Stapleton. He also shares songs here with Cardi B and Camila Cabello, Eminem and 50 Cent, and still even more. It’s like his very own version of a DJ Khaled album.
But one of the most oddly dynamic pairings is Sheeran, a mild-mannered pop savant who occasionally raps, with Travis Scott, a fireball of punky energy and stage-diving chaos. The pair get together on the bumping “Antisocial,” and in the video, which dropped Friday (July 12), they might as well be Tim Burton characters.
“Antisocial” does not sound a whole lot like other Ed Sheeran songs. Its electronic, muscular crawl is perhaps most similar to Scott’s gargantuan hit “Sicko Mode,” and its video scope is wide, featuring the two artists lifting beloved film elements from Edward Scissorhands and Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. It also reminds me a lot of the winding, cerebral Netflix show Maniac with all its costume and scenery changes and the overall feeling that you may be losing your mind.
At one point in the Dave Meyers-directed clip, Scott portrays a dentist with scissors for hands; at another, Sheeran and Scott seem to be rival sea captains in a spyglass-measuring contest. Sheeran also gets stung by a (CGI) bee while wearing a goofy wig and in a bathrobe and cries out “wanking fuckballs!” That’s a really good moment.
Watch all the madness in the “Antisocial” video above. You can listen to the rest of No.6 Collaborations Project right here.
