Chase Icon is reveling in the excitement of her new album, Icon Baby — and delivering an equally effervescent video. The dance-pop star premieres the “perfectly unhinged” video for her single “Bands on Me,” starring trans porn star Brittney Kade and internet personality Elena Genevinne, with Rolling Stone.
Sam Fine, the video’s director, conceptualized the “Bands on Me” visual which captures Icon posing by a strip pole while Kade and Genevinne embody sexy dancers. In the song, Icon sings to a man willing to drop all the cash possible to witness her allure: “Give it to me straight, no chaser,” she sings, sneaking in a double entendre.
“It was so perfectly unhinged… and like, so me,” Icon tells Rolling Stone of the video. “There was no hesitation — I knew Brittney and Elena had to be in it. It wouldn’t have made sense without them… There’s this duality to them, and to have them side by side with me [in my] hyper-realistic fantasy was a must.”
Icon says featuring her fellow trans friend Kade and Genvinne in the video was a no-brainer: She jokes that Kade is the “Maddie Ziegler to my Sia” and she calls Genevinne, who hosts the Elena Demonetized podcast, a “real-life goddess among us.” She adds, “Both Brittney and Elena represent something I identify with on a soul level: they’re like living, breathing, human Barbies, but each unique in their own worlds.”
“Bands on Me” arrives near the end of her debut album Icon Baby, which she released earlier this week, and includes single “SoCal Girl” and 2022’s viral hit “Like Me.” With the album, Icon solidifies her legacy of delivering underground queer bangers that embrace an “almost delusional” confidence and life on the internet. On the album, Icon never take itself too seriously: “I am Chanel, you bitches Bath and Body Works,” she muses on “Detour.”
“Everyone wants to put me into a box— coffin or dollhouse, this is my way of breaking out,” says Icon. “I can’t say this is the album people expected from me. Honestly, I don’t even think it’s the album I expected from me. But it’s exactly what I needed to make. It’s riskier, it’s rawer, it’s weirder — and what I love is that it all came like second nature.”
“I’m far more comfortable being polarizing than predictable,” she adds. “If history indicates anything, the people who don’t get it yet… eventually will.”
Icon will celebrate her album with release parties with hyperpop rave party-throwers SubCulture on April 11 in Los Angeles and April 26 in New York. She also released three exclusive vinyl variants of Icon Baby through Graffiti Records.
