Who’s Aidan Zamiri: Everything the Charli xcx collaborator has directed

Maybe the cultural peak of an overwhelming brat summer. Aidan Zamiri's video for the Billie Eilish-featuring hit took its central joke and refrain ("You want to guess the color of my underwear?") to its most extreme conclusion, culminating in an actual mountain of underwear that the two pop stars climb like a biblical mount. The video pairs Zamiri’s signature muted and mundane color palette with a colorful and surreal premise, and helped firmly plant Zamiri’s aesthetic flag in the cultural terrain before The Moment.

The Alice in Wonderland-inflected music video for a highlight track off Pinkpantheress's 2023 album Heaven knows plays with a "We're not in Kansas anymore" trope, with Pink entering a world of color from a drab black and white universe. The video, which features a magical white dove, is an extension of the album art for Heaven Knows, for which Zamiri also took the photos.

I am loathe to define an ad as "cinema," but this spot for Cash App, directed and written by Zamiri and Elijah Bynum, has a really rich sense of atmosphere and is charmingly surreal. In it, Timothée Chalamet negotiates with an old school shopkeeper over the price of rare and strange fruits. He only takes bartered currencies, like livestock, but his son suggests a modern form of payment ... like Cash App. Its genuine whimsy counteracts the corporate commercialism.

The lo-fi video for Yung Lean's "Bliss" featuring FKA twigs from the Swedish artist's 2022 album, Stardust depicts the two artists as newlyweds on a chaotic, and increasingly surreal, post-wedding trip featuring a regal white horse and couch atop a car. With a plethora of props and odd visual details, the video is another example of Zamiri’s sharp eye for art direction.

The highly stylized video for "SLIME" co-directed by Shygirl and Zamiri toggles between 3D animation of a Bratz-style Shygirl and the UK rapper in a plethroa of green screen settings. Its digital glamor immediately brings to mind 2020s computerized aesthetic; that look was necessitated by the quarantine, but Zamiri made what could have potentially been sterile, quite fabulous.

Zamiri helped create one of the most memorable album covers of the 2020s with Caroline Polachek's 2023 album, Desire, I Want To Turn Into You. On it, Polachek merges the quotidian with the biblical, as she crawls toward her desired object in a bus (that is seemingly transforming into a desert). Like Zamiri's album art direction for Pinkpantheress and Sega Bodega, the shot looks like a still from a wider film, giving it a sense of place and motion that is rare in album art.

Zamiri's video for Eilish's global mega-hit features the director's signature muted color palette and his penchant for destructive surrealism. It shows the Los Angeles singer being pushed and pulled by an invisible force, in turn wreaking havoc on a liminal office space.