See X Bid a Lighthearted Farewell to 2020 in Animated ‘Goodbye Year, Goodbye’ Video

The band X are closing out 2020 with a farewell anthem, “Goodbye Year, Goodbye,” which appeared on this past spring’s Alphabetland. “Goodbye year, goodbye,” singer Exene Cervenka and vocalist-bassist John Doe harmonize in their unique way, “Please don’t make us cry.”

The animation crew behind Tiny Concert, which recently made clips for Pearl Jam and Ozzy Osbourne, drew the band performing the song with added accouterments like a bottle of X tequila, a pesky tonearm bothering drummer DJ Bonebrake, and guitarist Billy Zoom smiling at the side of an LP.

The band got hip to Tiny Concert earlier in the year when the studio made a clip for the punk crew’s most famous anthem, “Los Angeles.” Doe reached out to the animator’s creative director, Keith Ross, and asked if he would want to make a similar clip for “Goodbye Year, Goodbye.”

“I like to think of Tiny Concert as a ‘venue’ where all my favorite bands come to play,” Ross said in a statement. “It’s an animated place where performances are reimagined in my scribbly illustration style. Tiny Concert has brought me even closer to the music I love. And as a lifelong fan, being able to work with X to create this music video and celebrate their new album was a very personal achievement for me.”

Alphabetland, which Rolling Stone included in its list of the 50 Best Albums of 2020, came out as a surprise release in late April available only on Bandcamp at the time. “This is a total indie, punk-rock way of doing it,” Doe told Rolling Stone. “People really embraced it. It feels good, too. It gives people something fun and kind of not just mindless to listen to.”

Doe also commented on the timeliness of it, since it came out in late April around the height of lockdowns in the U.S. “We were smart to have a record that’s pretty uptempo,” he said. “We just wanted to make a fun record that had meaning, and I think it’s taking on extra meaning because of the situation we’re in.”