Even if you don't know Chris Graue by name, there's a good chance you've seen one of his music videos. He's an in-demand director who's worked with tons of ska and punk bands, including NOFX, Reel Big Fish, The Bombpops, Red City Radio, We Are The Union, Bite Me Bambi, Mike Park, Half Past Two, and more, and he's also a musician who's about to debut his own new ska/chiptune project, Lo(u)ser.

"I've wanted to have a ska band since I was a kid, but I could never convince anybody else to do it with me," Chris tells us. " I ended up playing in a lot of punk bands (The Maxies, Pizza Wolf, Naronic Distress), guesting occasionally for ska bands (I've played keys for Half Past Two and trumpet for Suburban Legends), but I think my ideas have always just had too many layers of weird to get others to join in; ska was already a reach, but the chiptune stuff was just a bridge too far."

We're premiering Lo(u)ser's first single, "Growing Up," which was produced by former Reel Big Fish drummer Ryland Steen, and mixed by jgrabes and Reed Wolcott of We Are The Union. Chris played all the instruments and wrote and directed the video, and Vince Walker of Suburban Legends took on the role of camera guy. "This was the kind of video I would have pitched to a band as a ridiculous idea to soften them up for a much-more-sane-but-still-pretty-weird script," Chris said. "The problem is that, being my own project, there's nobody around to tell me no. Hopefully, this is the strangest thing I'll do, but probably not."

"Growing Up" is a super fun song that blends ska rhythms, chiptune glitchiness, and power pop melodies, and the video shows Chris raising an old Game Boy as if it's a human child. It's predictably hilarious, and it makes for a clever contrast with the song's hook of "Why can't I grow up?". Check it out below.