Pour que tu m’aimes — ‘DEMBANDZ’ by Pagaille

For years, there’s been this “rule” in the QS charter that we won’t host any video over thirty minutes in length. It was a simple way to set a boundary on the amount of time we could spend vetting videos: a few hour-long videos is a pretty big chunk of the workweek, yaknow? But all rules meet an eventual exception, and today, the board of directors signed off on us presenting DEMBANDZ to the QS viewership.

Max Wasungu had mentioned that him and his Pagaille crew had been working on a full-length project — one that would feature his first proper *part* — when we interviewed him back in February. It’s eleven minutes over the “limit,” but it’s so beautifully fried that it didn’t feel right to just cut a part out of it as a standalone thing.

DEMBANDZ is the natural amalgamation of a French-Canadian generation raised on Dime vids. Within the first couple minutes, you have the concept of a “galaxy brain” spot stretched to its brink, with metal signs covering sixty different types of surfaces, dipping into a literal dumpster, and back out of it. There’s a guy walking a llama through the snow. A dude drops in on a bank to ride-on grind a shaved tree stump, only to fruitlessly try to avoid a metal fence three feet after. Another guy boardslides across a fucking moat. Yes, a moat. And Max’s part is the perfect two-punch answer to “why hasn’t he put out a part yet?”

Best of all, the video never feels like a bit. This is how these dudes like to skate, and any great homie video is truly unconcerned with what anyone but the homies in it might think of the final result. Lucky for us, the result feels like an antidote to the last ten Very Serious Skate Videos™ you watched.

Video by Mathieu Gosselin for Pagaille.

Filmed by Simon Ratté-Bérubé and Lion Slaney.