Dreams players have been making a lot of creative things in the PlayStation 4 sandbox, including Mario games and a recreation of Adam Jensen’s swanky pad. Now, the biggest musicians in the world are getting in on the action. Yesterday, Noah Cyrus dropped a music video for her smash hit “July,” entirely created in Dreams.
The video centres on a marble statue of a sleeping woman in a dark, barely lit space. Reminiscent of Gris, the transcendent indie platformer from 2018, colour slowly bleeds back into view — and with it, you can start to make out sweeping vistas not unlike those you’d see in Middle Earth. It’s all very surreal.
“To be honest, it completely blew my mind to see what people were creating in Dreams,” Cyrus said at the start of the video. “Being able to create your own music videos just for fun, you know, at home with a PlayStation controller — it’s something very freeing about it.”
“July” itself is so much more than just another algorithmically-produced pop song. Sure, the acoustic guitar sounds like one of those starting tracks you’d get in a song-mixing program, but Cyrus’ vocals are remarkable. When that hook kicks it, it shakes the soul. The whistling sections, though not as technically proficient as, say, the stuff on Andrew Bird’s late-aughts albums, are an exercise in artistry. And those harmonies! I’m not saying “July” is the song of the summer. But I’m not not saying it, either. The song is worth a listen on its own. Put over a well-crafted, Dreams-made music video is even more worth your time.
This isn’t Cyrus’ first foray into the video game world. Earlier this summer, alongside Diplo and Young Thug, she hosted a concert on the main stage in Fortnite’s Party Royale mode. (I need a shower after writing that sentence.) Tangentially, in 2017, she teamed up with Marshmello — the famously masked electronic music producer who also once hosted a concert en plein Fortnite — for “Chasing Colours,” a rousing trance track with killer vocals and a drop that could get any room out of their seats (in a good way). So it’s cool to see her bring her talents to Dreams. “Dreams is… It is a hard-to-explain platform,” she said. “But it’s creativity at your fingertips, and it’s a way of expressing yourself.”
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