The Thrill of Sébastien Tellier's Latest Music Video
It’s the end of the year, school’s out, we’re cozying up, and we’re wrapping up our streaming year with cozy soundtracks. For me, December feels like a “buffer” month as the next year starts to materialize before us. Looking back on my Spotify/Tidal/YouTube Wrapped, I know all of my favourite songs and genres (and even my listening age of 47???), but that got me wondering… Do I know my favourite music video of this year? I love high-concept, campy music videos with some storytelling/worldbuilding eye candy, and so far, Abracadabra, Second Sleep, and Deep Diving have made it onto my list this year. But I still had been looking for my otherworldly storytelling music video akin to my favourite vertigo city of 2018’s No Tears Left to Cry. Well, Spotify wasn’t too wrong with my listening age of 47, because I do love 80/90’s infused music, and I think that just so happens to be the sonic, storytelling era of our latest and greatest music video contender!
Sebastien Tellier’s Thriller-esque music video for Thrill Of The Night is one of my favourite eye-candies of this year, with mesmerizing 80s worldbuilding visuals and a very literally vertigo-inducing club to tell its story. This isn’t just a one-off light show, but rather a parade for the world he has to offer us. Teaming with director Melchoir Leroux, who makes the dreamiest cinematic retrofuturistic visuals, pop-disrupter Slayyyter, legendary guitarist Nile Rodgers, Oscar Holter, who gave us Blinding Lights, this song is the neon-lit cinematic gemstone of Tellier’s three-single release for his upcoming album Kiss the Beast dropping January 30th, 2026. These three singles, Naif de Coeur, Thrill of the Night, and Refresh, draw us into Tellier’s high-concept, dreamy world of French Touch/House escapism, and are already setting the stage and giving us synthy strings and a common thematic thread sewn between songs.
The Thrill of the Night is about the dream of the night. Where freedom, festivities, and possibilities are bottomless. But this isn’t without its atmospherically melancholic prologue in the three-single act. The Thrill of the Night follows the introspective of Naif de Coeur’s ballad, the front-facing love and beauty of a night out, with one's underlying turmoil of longing to leave loneliness for something real. This sets the stage for the spectacle that is Thrill of the Night’s music video. Tellier and Leroux’s story follows a young woman in an ambiguously timeless city who is on the search for a man and finds her way into the even more timeless “Club Slayyyter Haus”. What follows is a bottomless neon-lit spectacle, where disco fever, fantasy, and vertigo are moshpitting to the pulse of Sebastien’s Thrill of the Night. Along the way, the woman runs into Nile Rodgers, guitar-surfing through the sweaty dance floor and up to the skyscraping neon lights. He guides her to the back of the club, to the heartbeat of the spectacle, where she finds the man she had been looking for. Sebastien sits in front of a baroque-esque synth organ whose pipes project glitter in sync with the music. When she reaches out to him and touches his shoulder, everyone in the club turns to her in shock as she transforms into an electrifying disco ball, dancing uncontrollably to the neon light show that brings her journey to an end.
But that isn’t the end of the story. The third single, Refresh, feels and sounds very much like a sobering reset after that night out. This song is all about replaying, restarting, and refreshing the game over until the end, then back again. Going through the same motions of our naive hearts beating to the thrill of the night and into the dawn, as we refresh our bodies to do it all over again.
If you’re thinking about clubbing this month, or (like me) staying at home and imagining visually rich worlds, Thrill of the Night’s music video offers its world of house disco escapism on a neon platter for our eyes and minds to feast on. And keep an eye out for Tellier’s Kiss the Beast coming out next month! Until then, here are my other favourite music videos over the past few years: