M.I.A released the music video for Y.A.L.A (You Always Live Once) for the track off of her new album Matangi, which came out earlier in November.

The video for Y.A.L.A, which inverts the popular adage Y.O.L.O (you only live once), is all neonized and presented like a photo negative with strobe effects. The clip begins with a warning about flashing images.

The singer's new album has divided critics: while some believe M.I.A has produced a uniquely brilliant piece of work, others think that the singer is really out of touch and the album is inaccesible. Enstars rounded up some reviews that succinctly articulate the album's strongest and weakest moments.

"If Maya Arulpragasam has a persecution complex, she's earned it. 'Let you into Super Bowl/You tried to steal Madonna's crown/What the fuck you on about?' she spits on Boom Skit, conjuring her haters: generic racists, critical magazine profilers, and the NFL litigators reportedly suing her for $1.5 mil for her bird-flip during her 2012 halftime performance with Madonna. It's a telling moment on her fourth LP, a mixtape-style mash-up of political provocations, ripostes, tough-gal love songs, neon DJ memes and ass-whooping South Asian-spiced beats. Like Kanye West, M.I.A. seemingly needs haters for fuel. On Matangi, her tank's full." -- Rolling Stone

"Falling halfway between the successful pop aspirations of "Kala" and the punky noise blasts of her last LP, Matangi keeps her idiosyncrasies, but it isn't quite a policy overhaul...There's some excellent production work from old M.I.A. hands like Switch and young rap titans like Hit-Boy, and the hazy, hopeful theology of Y.A.L.A.('YOLO' for reincarnationists) is a cool premise for an album of post-colonial uplift in the Internet era. It's just a shame that so much of the record feels more like an Assange-style data drop than a pointed, insistent statement." - Los Angeles Times

"Until now, her music has always been one step ahead of the curve, but that changes on Matangi, an unfocused, surprisingly dated album that includes only occasional bursts of the kind of forward-thinking, global-minded mash-up she's capable of." - NZHerald

"MIA has, to state the obvious, cultivated a divisive reputation, and that's not going to wither with a new album including a track called "aTENTion". And yet Matangi reveals, more explicitly than ever, her terrible secret: that she's also a quite brilliant pop star to boot." - The Independent

"M.I.A. never makes things easy. Like its creator, Matangi is flawed, frustrating, and occasionally confusing, but it's also intermittently brilliant and completely unique." - Spin

"Matangi, then, is a disappointing record not for any reasons having to do with its (or its maker's) lack of a coherent moral imperative. ('Ain't no Dalai Lama,' she shrugs unapologetically on the skronky intro track, Karmageddon). No, Matangi is a disappointing record because of how listlessly over and "beyond" everything it is-to the point that it often feels uncharacteristically weary and out of touch." - Pitchfork

Watch the video for the song here:

 

Tags: m.i.a matangi y.a.l.a