Photographer and filmmaker Danny Clinch collaborated with the team at Island Def Jam for a shoot with The Roots in support of their new album ‘Undun’, available for purchase now.

Undun is an existential re-telling of the short life of one Redford Stephens (1974-1999). “At this point in our career we’d like for our work to have a unifying theme, and an experiential quality,” says Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, 40. “We’ve been intentionally making our albums shorter in length so that they can be experienced as a continuous work. The music is band-oriented with an eye on the moody cinematic. As a DJ, I am the King of playlists, but I don’t want our albums to feel like a playlist or a mixtape for that matter. We want to tell stories that work within the album format and we want the stories to be nuanced and useful to people. Undun is the story of this kid who becomes criminal, but he wasn’t born criminal. He’s not the nouveau exotic primitive bug-eyed gunrunner like Tupac’s character Bishop in “Juice”… he’s actually thoughtful and is neither victim nor hero. Just some kid who begins to order his world in a way that makes the most sense to him at a given moment… At the end of the day… isn’t that what we all do?” (taken from realhiphopdaily.com)

And a little behind the scenes clip…

You can see more work by Danny Clinch on the Levine/Leavitt site.