Episode: Sean Solomon actually does care
Animator, Musician, and early Simpsons season enthusiast
Sean Solomon is an artist working across animation, music, and comics, whose practice is rooted in a DIY, punk ethos. His work moves between mediums, building a visual language that exists both on and off the screen. He just returned from Europe touring with Unknown Mortal Orchestra as their opener, performing alongside his animations on CRT monitors, VHS tapes, and large scale projections.
As an animator and director, his films have screened internationally, including at the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and span independent shorts as well as commercial work, including projects developed during his time with FOX’s ADHD Animation programming block. In Los Angeles, his imagery extends into public space, appearing on posters and walls across town. Videos of him singing and playing guitar alongside his hazy TV monitor animations have been going viral on TikTok and Instagram the past year or so.
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He has performed in bands such as Moaning and Moses Campbell, and now releases solo work. His latest album, The World Is Not Good Enough, released on Anti- Records, is accompanied by his own comics, extending his visual storytelling directly into sound. You might “recognize his whimsical artwork from visuals collabs with Run the Jewels… and Odd Future. Now, as a fully-fledged solo artist, Sean has tied the disparate threads of his creativity together.”
His recent work engages more directly with themes of mental health, family, and an uncertain but hopeful future, while maintaining the looseness and unpredictability central to his style.
“These songs are almost coming from a place of childlike expectations,” Sean says of the album, which features his own hand-drawn cover art in the vein of children’s author/illustrator Richard Scarry. “So many of my resentments towards the world and the people around me are because of these expectations I have of them. I tend to be sensitive. I want everything to be perfect and for people to be empathetic and thoughtful, and they just aren’t. Every song has that overall theme that things aren’t the way that they necessarily should be.”
Accompanying the album is the cartoon short, The Sean Solomon Show.
This short, all made by Solomon, with its smooth lines and soft mix is in contrast to his other more recent animated work. Largely working with VHS and CRTs, he extends the visual language seen in his music video Black Hole, pushing further into texture, distortion, and physical playback. The same sense of instability and emotional weight carries through, but now filtered through analog decay with flicker, scan lines, and signal noise.
Black Hole becomes a recurring point of reference throughout this episode, I’d recommend watching it before listening. It captures the intersection of his animation and music practices in a distilled form. The piece reflects his instinct for blending raw, hand-drawn imagery with emotional undercurrents, creating something immediate and ruminative and hand crafted. As discussed on the podcast, it serves as a window into how he builds atmosphere and narrative across mediums, and why that synthesis has become such a defining part of his work. Short mini-doc about the making of the video.
Really excited about this episode! Bit longer than usual, hope you dig it.
You can check out this episode right now!
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