It would be easy to assume that on top of covers, merch, posters, and Jacob being most easily categorised as an illustrator-painter of ‘static’ works, that music videos would be a whole other mountain to cross. But Jacob studied animation at university, and, growing up, he was fascinated by film and had big dreams of being a film director – he could often be found recording video clips from his favourite films and making his own custom soundtrack for them. It’s also an area that lets him practice something else he loves: collaboration. The three videos released so far have been directed by Billy Howard Price (Larchmont), Peter Eason Daniels (Death Valley Morning Dew) and Elena Isolini (Hungry). “If it was all just me I would never get anything done,” the artist says. “I love to work with other people’s vision of how they interpret my stuff.”
While Larchmont and Death Valley Morning Dew feel united by black-and-white tones and an otherworldly, distinctly 1950s cinematic edge, Hungry, the most recent video released is filmed in colour and feels much more ‘2025’, with a day-in-the-life POV of Jacob going about his day: hopping on a Lime bike, heading to the British Library, before ending with a hallucinating trip fairground – dodgems and all. This visual division – between the older more “big band” tracks written before Jacob’s father passing, and the later, synth-based tracks written after – wasn’t intentional, but it ended up working well. “That process of the black-and-white turning to colour is actually quite important, because that’s what I was going through,” Jacob says. The period after his father’s death, when he bought the 1990s JD 800 synthesiser “that sounded like [his] childhood” and features heavily in the album, was first and foremost, a period of grieving, but it also turned into a period of creative experimentation, one where Jacob worked hard to “try and find the positivity in the world”, he says.