vlog yrself clean with Hank Beaudoin

Recently, my TikTok FYP blessed me with a video that seemed designed specifically for me to enjoy: a 21-year-old filmmaker named Hank Beaudoin, newly obsessed with LCD Soundsystem, went to a bunch of their 2025 Knockdown Center residency shows, then spent a whopping sum ($8K, to be exact) to see them in Aspen, Colorado on New Year's Eve 2025. He documented this whirlwind experience of fandom and edited it in an educational and engaging style—you would get something out of this video if you were a longtime LCD head, or an innocent rando midway through an endless scroll—and posted it with the title "LCD Soundsystem: the greatest dance party on earth."

The video practically vibrates with youthful exuberance, showing how the experience of getting really into a band feels like falling in love. I remembered my own near-instant conversion to LCD acolyte, the headiness of discovering all the shout-along choruses, the way the pit opens up for "Movement" if you're lucky, that moment in "Us V Them" when the bass sort of snaps into place with the hi-hats. "Something happens to your brain when the echoes of 2,000 voices around you turn the lyric I can change into an undeniable truth...it changes you," Beaudoin says in a voiceover as he and his friends cavort around Aspen, looking like they're having the time of their lives. I've been aware of this band for 21 years, and a genuine fan for ten, and yet this way of describing LCD fandom was new to me, and so wonderful and accurate. Being a fan of a band is the gift that keeps on giving: you keep getting new perspectives on the things you like, which re-affirms why you like them in the first place.

Not only did I love the video as an LCD fan, I also enjoyed the secondary layer of Beaudoin's mini-doc, which was—get this—an ad for a drink company called Loom. In the mode of Casey Neistat's "Make It Count," where Neistat filmed himself spending the budget for a Nike ad on traveling the world (Hank posted about "copying" this video, and Neistat commented, "you looking for a job?"), Beaudoin shows Loom CEO Bill Butrymowicz, faux-baffled at the apparently misappropriation of the Loom ad budget on a spendy Colorado trip; he also sneaks in some product placement:

I'm on the record as being open-minded to the intersection of music and branded experience, and this video pulled off its #sponsored status in a very elegant way. This is capitalism, baby—bills need to be paid, you might as well pay them in style.

Anyway, I knew I needed to talk to Beaudoin about how the video got made, and the genesis of his LCD fandom. I chatted with him on the phone while he was on a break from touring with the artist honestav—the media company he co-runs with his friends, Project FreeFall, has been doing all the video stuff for his tour. After telling him that I don't think I've ever met a young person named Hank ("My mom always said that I would never be a Hank...that didn't work"), we got right into it.

[Molly Mary O'Brien] First—how did you get into LCD Soundsystem?

[Hank Beaudoin] It was a year and a half ago, at the end of my sophomore year of college. All my other friends that I'm building Project FreeFall with, they were seniors, and I left college early, so we found [LCD] at the end of college. We honestly knew "All My Friends" and "Dance Yrself Clean" and that was it. We just listened to those two songs on repeat, and that was kind of the extent of it. Then we moved to Brooklyn, and they had their residency at the Knockdown Center, and so we were like, We know, like, three of their songs, but this will be a great time, and we absolutely fell in love with them after seeing them live.

Yup, that'll do it. I'm 36, I never saw an LCD show in their heyday—the first time I saw them was when they reunited to headline Coachella in 2016. So it's amazing to hear that younger people are newly getting into LCD Soundsystem.

It's funny because everyone we talked to about them are like, Oh, you should have seen them 15 years ago. This is nothing, you're catching them at the wrong time.

Ohhh, I hate that kind of sentiment. You're getting them now! They still rip. Anyway, I would love to talk about the creation of the video, which is an LCD Soundsystem mini-documentary, and also a commercial for a drink company. How did this video come to be?

So I went to three LCD Soundsystem residency shows. This was before Loom was affiliated at all. I went to the first show and then I was like, I'm gonna just keep going, and make a video about it, just to show my appreciation for how good their music is. Then I saw their next show was in Aspen for New Year's Eve. My business partner Nick and I had been starting to work with Loom on a couple other smaller scale projects. Nick as a joke, threw out the idea of, what if we ask Loom to cover the whole cost of the trip and sponsor the documentary? And I was like, That will never happen.

Then we asked, and it turns out their founder has also seen them a bunch of times and is a huge LCD Soundsystem fan. So totally to my surprise, he sponsored the whole trip—which is an expensive trip, to go to Aspen. So I'm super grateful to Loom and we've since expanded our partnership—we're actually part-owners in the company now, so they're very near and dear to our hearts.

I think what strikes me about that video in particular—it's very well done, it has artistic integrity...and it made you some money! Or at least covered what would have cost a lot of money. And I feel like you lowkey solved this problem that a lot of people have in creative careers: how do you make money from doing creative stuff that you're actually passionate about?

Thank you so much. Those words mean a lot, and I agree, it's such a balance—you can make creative work that you love, where you can do whatever you want and make very little or no money, or do client work to make money where you have to follow the rules. So major shout out to Loom, they genuinely are a company that is trying to empower artists to make what they want to make.

So the Aspen show was unique both in location and the expensive ticket price...what was the vibe at the show?

I would say the crowd was definitely a little more upscale. It was definitely an Aspen crowd. But in the pit there were still LCD lovers, for sure. And it was small. I think the venue was like 500 cap, so it was a cool experience to be right there, right in front of them. And it was just euphoric...the actual Happy New Year on "Dance Yrself Clean," there could not have been a better countdown to 2026. I was just in disbelief, like, how am I even here right now?

That's amazing. I'd love to take it back a little bit—when did you realize that this is something that you wanted to do with your life? How did you get into filmmaking?

I've always made videos since I was a little kid—Call of Duty videos and Fortnite videos. And from the ages of, like, 13 to 19, I went on a million different entrepreneurial journeys in a bunch of different directions, but they always went back to social media or video in some respect. And then I met my business partner Nick, the founder of Project FreeFall, my freshman year of college, and he was getting paid to make music videos and hang out with music artists, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. I had been working on a couple of my own side businesses at the time and I was like, I'm just gonna drop all this and come work with you.

There's a video from two years ago on my channel called "It took me 19 years to find what I love." Basically, I had to drop my ego, because I always wanted to be the one that started the business, be the top guy. I was making money in all these different ventures, but I never found fulfillment in it. And so I had a breakdown going into my sophomore year and I was like...I had no relationship with a higher power or God at the time, but I literally broke down. I was like, Please, if you exist, God, just give me something that I can put my all into, that I can put my love into. I've tried so many different things and nothing is clicking. And God came back and was like, You love making people smile, you love making videos, and you love telling stories. That was two years ago, and from that point on, I've been like, I'm just gonna make videos, and make more videos, and see what happens.

That's a big deal to leave college early for this thing!

Yeah, definitely a lot of, uh, conversations with the parents. But I'm so grateful for Nick and all my other friends at Project FreeFall because that's really what made it possible. That's what I was able to bring to my parents and be like, yo, look at what we're building—this is bringing in consistent income to the point where I can sustain myself on my own.

With Project FreeFall, what are the big north star goals of the company?

What we've always said is that we want to be the Gen Z MTV. I think in five to ten years, we run a network of shows, both longform and shorter-form social media-based shows where we have different artists come on and participate in whatever that concept is. One that we're in the process of filming the first season of is a show called Tour Life, where we peek inside different artists' tours for four or five shows, meet their crew, get a rundown of their routine, and basically hang out with them—and we're characters in the show. We filmed the pilot episode and we're in the process of filming our second episode right now. And I'd assume we would continue the agency side of [Project FreeFall] and do different campaigns for music artists themselves.

That sounds cool. I grew up watching MTV and shows like Making The Video, and Tour Life feels very much in that vein. Okay, I think you have a skillset that is falling into disrepair societally, which is that you seem to be very good at talking to strangers. Is that something you've always been able to do?

No! It's not something that I've always done. Later in high school, I developed really bad social anxiety. It would come up in certain situations, and it was disabling—I would throw up, I couldn't go to school for days. I was completely torn apart by it. How I have navigated it—and I still kind of exist with it, but I have a better relationship with it—is that I pushed back against it, hard. Anytime I feel the anxiety, I'm not gonna let it stop me. Whenever I feel it... I'm just gonna do whatever I need to do. And so I've become this ultra-outgoing person, because I need to in order to survive. I need to be outgoing or else the anxiety is gonna creep in and take over.

I think I also am just naturally outgoing, so I won't give all the credit to that. But with the talking to strangers thing, it's just like...if I see this stranger and have the thought that I'm gonna talk to them, then my heart will start to race a little bit, and I have to do it, or else it's considered a defeat in my mind.

That makes total sense. You were going so hard in one direction that you had to go hard in the other direction.

But honestly, I think it's something that the world needs more of. The way that society's been built, strangers don't really talk to each other, but I feel like there is a world where that is a thing that people do, and everyone is just having conversations.

Well it was so great to chat with you. I feel like the magic of social media is like: that video showed up on my phone, I loved it, I wanted to talk to the person who made it...you're putting out energy into the world with these things that I think is going to keep paying dividends for you.

I appreciate that. It's funny too, because I posted that video on YouTube back in February, and it was just sitting there. I think it got 500 views in a month, and that was it. And then I posted one video on Instagram about it, where I was like, "I copied Casey Neistat's most viral ad," and then Casey Neistat commented on that. Then I posted another video that did well, so that pushed it to like 5,000 views on YouTube. And I don't post on TikTok at all—I literally didn't even have a TikTok account, but my partner Nick was like, yo, Hank, just post the full thing on TikTok. And so I made an account and I posted it, and it ended up doing really well. It's kinda crazy how that works. I think TikTok, more than any other platform—if you make a video about LCD Soundsystem, it's gonna find the LCD Soundsystem people.

Thanks Hank! Follow Project FreeFall and subscribe to Hank's YouTube channel, @hankdoes.

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