7 Years In The Making — Palace’s “Detroit 313” Video

The “return” of the full-length skate video is something that has been forecasted on such a loop that we can safely conclude it was never at risk of extinction in the first place.

However, in this past month, two of the year’s marquee releases both clocked in at a few minutes shy of an hour.

Palace’s Detroit 313 video is notable because it took seven years to film — an eternity in the social media era, and an echo back to skate videos’ blockbuster “golden age” when two or three full-lengths a decade was a reasonable cadence for a brand.

At a time when everything falls under the label of “content,” it is easy to fall into a routine. We are all guilty of it.

“Hey, saw you were in Hot-European-Skate-City-4 last month!”

“Yeah! The edit that has the kickflip on the spot where I posted an ollie on the story drops next week! It’s edited to a song someone is gonna tell me already got used in the comments!”

For years, whenever Brady or whoever on the team would mention that they were going back to Detroit, we would joke, “You guys are still pretending like that video is ever coming out?”

Skate videos — at their best, at least — build a world. To pick a city in America largely because you grew up listening to the techno that originated there, fly your dozen-ish teamriders out there a dozen-ish times over the course of seven years, to keep hucking yourself into that front feeble, and to be indifferent to the workings of the greater skate world while the footage sits on ice …takes un-2026 levels of commitment. We’re all so paranoid about what tricks will already have been done, what songs will already have been used, or if the parts and lenses needed to keep our cameras alive will even be available anymore. I’m sure some of these guys were tripping watching seven-year-old footage of themselves at the premiere, but when you’re creating a world, it’s all part of the story. That is the story. You feel like you’ve been going to Detroit for seven years with them by the end of it.

People change, grow, get better and worse at skateboarding. The Detroit of 2018-2025 feels like a perfect canvas for that because it itself feels frozen in time; you can count the pedestrians in this video on your hands. The locals have their stories from there yes, but most brands rarely stay long enough for it to feel like anything greater than a recap — the skate equivalent of an influencer’s June-in-Italy photodump. These guys molded it into something special. It’s immersive, and not optimized for the scroll. Who would have thought a 2026 skate video that took seven years to make could feel so futuristic?

I’m just glad they kept pretending it was still coming out ❤️ It feels like the video the company was born to make.