The music videos for Sia’s This Is Acting songs are growing increasingly different from those for 1000 Forms of Fear. First, we had “Alive,” which centers on a little girl—specifically, Mahiro Takano, a Japanese child star—doing karate while wearing a blunt-bobbed wig. This marked a bit of a departure from Sia’s usual videos, which tend to star Dance Moms star Maddie Ziegler. But those of us who thought Takano could be the next Ziegler might have been mistaken. Sia has a new lyric video out for “Cheap Thrills,” featuring a new verse from Sean Paul and, more notably, no Takano.
Instead of Sia’s usual sparse, artsy style, this video goes retro—and weird. The entire thing is framed as a 1950s-era black and white broadcast, where a new song—Sia’s “Cheap Thrills”—gets played on “Dance Stage U.S.A.,” a faux American Bandstand-style show. Everyone’s getting groovy in an appropriately reserved manner, until two masked strangers in wigs show up and steal the show with some revolutionary moves. This might be different from Sia’s norm, but as the two interlopers teach everyone how to do what appears to be the Time Warp at the end of the video, the pervading sentiment is the same as with any other Sia video: It’ll be interesting to see what she does next.
