This is the latest preview video from Naughty Boy's upcoming 'Hotel Cabana' album. We're been sent it to preview exclusively here on Popjustice…
…although you can hear longer clips of more songs over on the iTunes pre-order page so we're not really sure what it all means. Still, it gives us an excuse to talk about the fact that the Naughty Boy 'team' have been showing off the album quite a lot over the last month or so, and they've been doing it in a really creative and exciting way.
Multi-vocalist producer-led albums are always a bit tricky, particularly when you've got a producer who doesn't seem to show much interest in appearing in his own videos and isn't a Mark Ronson or Timbaland type. So this idea of a hotel housing different artists is quite good. We're as FUCKING BORED as you all are of endless teaser videos that don't amount to very much but the Naughty Boy ones have been great.
This is the first of two trailers that came out last month.
And this is the second.
That second one really makes this album seem like an event doesn't it?
Here's what it says on the Hotel Cabana website (which, sadly, isn't designed to look like an actual hotel website, but what can you do).
Eighteen months in the making, Naughty Boy’s debut album transcends music alone – it’s a concept, a world, a story: Hotel Cabana. The conceptual album features a stellar cast of urban & pop superstars, each playing a character in this filmic narrative. "I want it to be an album for our time; it has a concept to it, so it’s more like a film in some respects,” says Naughty, “I view it like I’m not just a producer – I’m a director too.”
Hotel Cabana is a place that’s as much a metaphor as it is a geographical location, as much a state of mind as a tangible space filled with people creating and sharing the experience. Yet not everything here is always as it seems. The doorway’s the same, but the entrance can exist anywhere. Every doorway leads you back to the same place, this place, The Hotel Cabana – with some invisible force pulling the strings in this tarnished paradise.
You can check in, but you can never check out…
Paragraph two stops just short of describing the whole thing as a reverse Warholian expedition but the last line is brilliant. Imagine if Naughty Boy's whole hotel operation was actually more along the lines of a Psycho-meets-Hostel setup, ie he tricks popstars into coming to stay at his 'luxury pad' then after they've sung a song or two (or nine, in Emeli Sandé's case) he kills them in a variety of creative and unpleasant ways. Naturally it might prove tricky persuading artists to turn up to record 'Hotel Cabana 2' in a couple of years, but it would make a good press angle.