Get a Reptilian Makeover in Sad13’s Video for New Song “<2”

Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis will release her first solo album under the Sad13 moniker, Slugger, on November 11. Before we’d ever heard the album’s first single, “Get a Yes​,” the concept seemed interesting. Dupuis, the leader of Noisey’s 2015 band of the year​, has a way of twisting her work into new shapes to surprise an audience; there’s rarely time to get comfortable. “Basement Queens​,” her unlikely and exceptional track with Lizzo, was proof enough.

The second track off Slugger dropped today. It’s called “<2” and there’s a video to go along with it, an homage to YouTube makeup tutorials. The track itself, like “Get a Yes,” is both familiar and foreign. Dupuis’s verses are more simply poppy than anything off, say, Foil Deer. But her tendency towards jagged melodies breaks through the mix eventually, a bridge with suspended harmony or a jolt of something atonal. And, as before, the fuzzy guitars are all set to blinking synths.

Here’s what Dupuis said about the track and the video:

“<2” is about choosing to be glossy AND caustic. It’s about knowing you’re smart, knowing you’re doused in glitter, and refusing to seethese two bits of self-knowledge as conflicting. My high school rival was a bigoted Eagle Scout, furiously confounded at the reality that a
girly teen (me!) was his academic superior. Ten years later, as an adult human who lurks around the “feminine” quadrant of the gender map, I STILL come up against ignoramuses who conflate feminized personal style with anti-intellectualism.

Being “in the less than two” is about finding balance between two selves, exterior and interior. It’s about allowing those selves to coexist in alliance but not in interdependence—and about loving
yourself in a world that doesn’t want you to. What’s less than two? A singular person, who is by definition their own number one. Life is booby-trapped with boring nepotists who mistakenly equate professional competence with utterly rigid reproductions of masculinity. If you don’t/won’t/can’t fit that role, self-obsession becomes a radically necessary preservation tool.

The “<2” video is an homage to YouTube and Instagram MUAs, via a series of makeup tutorials that become increasingly surreal. Undergoing several dissimilar cosmetic transformations fit with the song’s theme of self-determinism, while also celebrating aesthetic mutability. Plus, we wanted to make me look like a reptilian and glue a bagel to my head. Some of these looks adhere to conventionally feminine beauty norms, some embrace masculinity, more often than not they treat the face as a gender-neutral canvas, letting cosmetics be Art-for-art’s-sake.

​​Watch the video below.

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