The Postal Service - The District Sleeps Alone Tonight

What this video is

Released in July 2003, this video accompanied what became one of the defining singles of early-2000s American indie music. The Postal Service's Give Up — a long-distance collaboration between Ben Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jimmy Tamborello (Dntel) conducted by mailing DATs and CDs — embodied the era's anxious romanticism and physical dislocation. The song's lyrical subject, Washington D.C. as a site of…

Why it matters

This video is a primary artifact of the indietronica movement at its commercial and critical peak. Give Up spent 111 weeks on the Billboard Independent Albums chart and became Sub Pop's second-best-selling album behind Nirvana's Bleach. The video's understated visual approach — rejecting MTV-era…

The director

Cobra Kai is a directing collective credited on two 2003 Sub Pop music videos for The Postal Service: 'The District Sleeps Alone Tonight' and 'Such Great Heights.' Their IMVDb profile lists no other video credits. The collective's individual member…