clipping. — Mirrorshades pt. 1

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

clipping. — Mirrorshades pt. 1 (2025) Director: Iddo Goldberg Era: Mid-2020s Cyberpunk Hip-Hop Renaissance (2025) - Industrial rap group clipping. deploys retro-futurist Max Headroom-era visual language to critique hyperdigitalization and techno-surveillance culture on Sub Pop Records. High curatorial value as a 2025 primary source document capturing the cyberpunk hip-hop revival at its most formally realized. The video directly materializes the album's conceptual framework — Gibson's Neuromancer, Sterling's Mirrorshades anthology, Max Headroom's media-satire legacy — into a concrete visual artifact. Director Iddo Goldberg's sci-fi screen background (Snowpiercer) and the group's Hugo-nominated literary ambitions make this a rare music video with genuine cross-disciplinary archival resonance spanning hip-hop studies, science fiction scholarship, and media criticism. Context: Released September 19, 2025 as part of Dead Channel Sky Plus — the digital deluxe expansion of clipping.'s fifth studio album Dead Channel Sky (Sub Pop, March 14, 2025) — 'Mirrorshades pt. 1' operates at the intersection of cyberpunk literary tradition and contemporary industrial hip-hop. The album title references the static-filled sky in William Gibson's foundational cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, while 'Mirrorshades' itself invokes the seminal 1986 cyberpunk anthology edited by Bruce Sterling. The video's Max Headroom aesthetic reaches back to the 1980s as a critique of hyperdigitalization, surveillance, and media saturation — themes urgently resonant in the mid-2020s political and technological climate. clipping.'s broader practice of treating hip-hop as science fiction narrative (two Hugo Award nominations) lends this video deep genre-literary credibility. Director notes: Goldberg directed the official music video for clipping.'s 'Mirrorshades pt. 1,' released September 19, 2025 via Sub Pop Records. The video is explicitly described by multiple sources as Max Headroom-inspired, with the group starring and Daveed Diggs taking the lead as the titular character. Goldberg is credited as director by Sub Pop Records' official news release, Ghetto Blaster Magazine, and Neon Splatter. This represents a notable crossover of Goldberg's visual storytelling sensibility — honed in sci-fi television (Snowpiercer) — into music video direction for an experimental hip-hop act.