It took me a while to work out which of David Boring and Jenny Rotten is the band name and which is the song title but I’ve worked it out now.

It turns out that David Boring (terrible name or what?!) is – are – a five-piece band from Hong Kong and Jenny Rotten is a tune from their recently released second album, Liminal Beings And Their Echoes.

The anxiety-inducing music video, directed by Hong Kong-based rapper and videographer Luckigirl (Fotan Laiki), is shot like a stitched-together digital diary.

Evoking qualities of experimental found footage works such as the Blair Witch Project, its lo-fi texture and glitchy realism aim “to destabilize the boundary between fiction and authenticity, transforming the viewer into both witness and participant in its psychological unravelling.” Or so they say.

Ominous entities lurk just out of frame, with hints of a menacing game driving the distorted reality, inviting viewers “to project their latent anxieties and fears of the everyday into its shifting, haunted landscape.”

That’s how they put it. I would prefer to describe both video and song as eerie and sinister, with a grimly hypnotic dance groove that keeps you on edge, emphasised by the grainy, glitchy, found footage.

Apparently it was inspired by creepypastas* surrounding the use of “Randonautica.” Me neither; it’s apparently a random coordinate generator app that gained infamy during the COVID-19 pandemic after reportedly leading two teens to a corpse.

I suppose you could call it video concrète.

*Creepypastas – a term new to me – refers to user-generated horror content posted online to frighten people.