A Frantic Pleasure — Rios Crew’s Toló 2 is Now Live

Now that we have been anointed as the people who shout the loudest about the Rios videos, it is only right to inform you that their latest, Toló 2, is online in full.

Spot envy has long been an attraction of European skate videos. Thanks to those first three Flip videos, our younger selves came to imagine Europe as this mystic, open place where Le Dome and MACBA were down the street from one another (or as Frozen in Carbonite put it, “football-sized marble plazas [between] Louis IX-era office buildings.”) This allure of Euro videos has continued today, but honestly, the Rios videos never had that. It’s tough to think of a spot they skate that incites an immediate, “Damn! I want to skate that!”

In fact, it doesn’t feel like they revisit spots all that often. The videos are unique because every clip feels like a smash and grab of tricks strung together on rickety tiles on the way to a spot that they never actually arrive at.

We don’t know anything about Budapest apart from what these videos show us. We can’t name a single “famous” spot in the city like we could for Lyon, Madrid or even Sofia. But the Budapest of the original Toló (released six years ago), and the one found found in its sequel, feels like a different place. People are more hostile to skateboarding. The city looks like it built a few new plazas in front of some stores. The tiles look a bit cleaner than they did in 2014. It seems like more people skate there now.

Even if it has increasing hints of the familiar, Toló 2 won’t resemble any other scene video you’ll watch this month. The music is as weird as ever, serving as an ambient companion to everyone’s blown-out bearings. The camerawork is claustrophobic, and practically wants to get the fisheye inside of the skaters’ wheel in some shots. While the Rios videos have never been about having the most technical skateboarding, every skater in them works to create a distinct world for twenty minutes. At a time when travel is at a stand-still, being transported somewhere else via a skate video is all we can ask for.

(Always loved that dogs continue to have a recurring place in their videos too ♥)

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