Ya Tseen — Taste On My Lips (feat. Portugal. The Man, Meshell Ndegeocello, Sidibe)

JUL 01 2025 · 12:00

Ya Tseen — Taste On My Lips (feat. Portugal. The Man, Meshell Ndegeocello, Sidibe) (2025) Director: Stephen Gray Era: Post-Pandemic Indigenous Art-Pop (2025) - Era defined by genre-fluid Indigenous-led collaborative collectives on legacy indie labels, merging ancestral identity with contemporary funk, soul, and alt-pop production. High-value archival document of a rare convergence: an Indigenous-led, Sub Pop-backed art-pop release featuring a multi-generational all-star cast (Ndegeocello, Portugal. The Man, Sidibe) under a director with an established Ya Tseen collaboration history. The video's extreme chiaroscuro and meditative tempo distinguish it aesthetically from contemporaries, making it a strong case study in how 2020s indie-label music videos deploy deliberate visual restraint to encode cultural and philosophical depth. Context: Released July 25, 2025 as the lead single from Ya Tseen's second Sub Pop album Stand On My Shoulders (January 16, 2026), 'Taste On My Lips' emerges from the expanding creative universe of Nicholas Galanin — a Tlingit and Unangax̂ multi-disciplinary artist whose practice spans customary carving, sculpture shown at the Whitney Biennial and Sydney Biennial, and music. The track assembles an unusually distinguished cross-genre collaborative roster: Portugal. The Man (alt-rock), Meshell Ndegeocello (neo-soul/funk bass), and Sidibe (indie-soul vocals). The album situates ancestral continuity and intergenerational love as the philosophical foundation, building on the revolutionary love themes of Ya Tseen's 2021 debut Indian Yard. The video's extreme darkness and contemplative pacing visually mirror the concept of dance-floor connection as a site of memory and communal survival across generations. Director notes: Confirmed director per Sub Pop Records official press release (July 25, 2025) and Circuit Sweet (July 28, 2025). Both sources quote artist Nicholas Galanin describing the track as 'a love note written for the dance floor, inspired by connections made possible on those floors for generations.' The video is described across press sources as capturing 'the joy and movement at the heart of the song — an anthem for presence, memory, and community.' Gray had a prior directorial collaboration with Ya Tseen on 'Close the Distance' (2021), establishing an existing creative relationship between director and artist. The quantitative metadata (brightness 30.84, motion 4.15, avg shot 14.56s) supports a deliberately slow, intimate, darkly-lit visual approach consistent with the song's dance-floor nostalgia theme rendered through introspective rather than kinetic imagery.