Post Malone’s intergalactic music video – with aliens snogging brains – is pure Adult Swim gold

After watching Post Malone’s new music video Wrapped Around Your Finger, we can say with certainty: Post and Adult Swim are a match made in heaven. The network behind the likes of Rick and Morty has just produced a similarly irreverent sci-fi world for the new Post single, based loosely on the intergalactic lyrics that make up Wrapped Around Your Finger. The rest of the animated content however, is classic Adult Swim imagination. Bizarre aliens, trippy tentacles, and a twisted love story; rather than creating a new style for Post, the music video was pitched to Post as a straight-up Adult Swim treatment. “We know Post loves Adult Swim because he had visited the office in prior years,” explains Jacob Escobedo, who worked on making the vision a reality.

The music video follows Post (in the form of a space phantom) and his alien girlfriend as they meander through the cosmos in a convertible Galaxie 500. They pass some expected Adult Swim sights – dead astronauts, empty bottles, space creatures “drinking and making love to the beat”, Adult Swim explains in a release. After flying through trippy tunnels – closely evoking fairground-style tunnels of love – and seeing the sights together, the video closes with a kaleidoscopic alien vision and Post returning to earth, sadly alone.

Adult Swim had just over three weeks to turn the work around, “so, we were working around the clock on all the designs and backgrounds and animatic,” Jacob explains, while also partnering with Primal Screen to help deliver the animation and edit in a tight timeframe. The initial idea came together even quicker; within 24 hours of learning about the project, Adult Swim had sent Post’s team a rough pitch.

Adult Swim’s Adam Fuchs helped craft the distinct style of the animation – Jacob says Adam’s handiwork can particularly be seen in the trippy tunnels – while Jacob and artist Terry White “drew all the characters in one night while eating noodles in the Adult Swim writer’s room”.

In the case of Wrapped Around Your Finger, the quick turnaround was an asset. With no time to linger too heavily on creative decisions or run through multiple iterations, Adult Swim has delivered a narrative plucked straight from a strange chain of thought. This approach pays off best in moments like the show-stopping snogging scene at the video’s start. Described by Jacob as a “breakthrough moment”, the scene sees “[Post’s] girlfriend penetrating his eyeholes with her distended eyes, kissing his drunk brain”. As Jacob puts it: “Why wouldn’t we do that?”

The Post music video launched as part of the new Adult Swim festival on Friday 5 August in Philadelphia, which celebrates the work of Cartoon Network’s programming for grown-ups.