Indie rockers turning to nudity in videos to promote their music

"People said, 'That was a really smart decision,' " says Nils Bernstein, director of publicity for Matador Records, the parent company of Girls' label True Panther Sounds. "Sure, I'll take credit. But it wasn't a ploy. . . . People really respond to that authenticity and realness."

Brooklyn group Yeasayer aims for surrealness in its new video, "Ambling Alp." The clip features hooded boxers sparring in metallic gloves, a lone horseman galloping through an alien wilderness, and a gaggle of unclothed bodies tumbling down the slopes of a dormant volcano a few hours east of Los Angeles.

There's nudity, yes, but it feels secondary to the dreamlike imagery that dominates the four-minute clip. Directors Kirby McClure and Julia Grigorian of Radical Friend, a video production company based in Los Angeles, say that they didn't make the clip with traditional outlets in mind.

"The kind of people we want to reach and the kind of people that Yeasayer want to reach aren't the people watching MTV2 at 2 in the morning," McClure says. "We want to engage people who are out [searching] for it."

That means courting fans exclusively online -- something embodied in the bizarre Web site Yeasayer has launched at AmblingAlp.com. There, visitors can gaze through a sort of digital, Duchampian peephole and observe a still outtake from the "Ambling Alp" video. Moving your cursor over a circular image taken with a 360-degree camera reveals a cipher of nude men and women that you can scan from head to hips. Yes, it's freaky.

"We were always into the idea of creating a world," says Yeasayer singer Chris Keating. "It felt like a fully immersive Web environment. If you want to look at a girl's [bleeps] or a dude's [bleep], you're the pervert. We're all perverts. . . . I love that idea."

But will we always be perverts?

"I think that people are going to constantly be trying to get eyeballs and get people talking," says Gottlieb of Video Static. "Maybe nudity is working right now, but maybe that line gets pushed somewhere else sometime soon."