“Tom was meant to sing in the choruses of the track,” says Olga Bell of recording today’s art-rock earworm “Oyster” with Tom Vek under the name Nothankyou. “I wrote the lower parts specifically for him, but he liked my goofy pitch-shifted mockups so much he convinced me to leave them in.” As well as doing her best impression of his vocal, Russian-born, Brooklyn-based Bell dressed up as the London multi-instrumentalist—as well as donning a blonde wig—for the self-directed video she shot in a 19th-century former school house in Bushwick. The video’s aesthetic owes a lot to the photography of Richard Avedon: “particularly In the American West, as well as lots of 90s Calvin Klein ads and that iconic morphing sequence at the end of Michael Jackson's ‘Black or White’ video.” The pair first met online, when Bell pursued Vek on MySpace after he released 2005’s floor-filling debut, We Have Sound. “I actually think it might have been discussing ‘Single Ladies’ and the merits of its production,” says Vek of what clinched their collaboration. Since then, classically trained Bell has forged her own solo career—she is working on her second solo record following her 2011 debut—and last year joined the Dirty Projectors, Dave Longstreth’s freeform indie outfit, while Vek followed up with his second record Leisure Seizure in 2011. Look out for a forthcoming album from Nothankyou, made out of necessity via Dropbox and Skype.

Do you have any particular memories from filming today’s video?
Olga Bell: I got up at 7am to get fresh oysters! I was going to use shells from the restaurant around the corner, but the idea of cleaning other people's slurp and soaking shells in detergent the night before the shoot was too much.

Are you fans of the seafood delicacy? If so, how is it best served?
OB: I like small, briny oysters on the half-shell with lots of peppery mignonette.  
Tom Vek: My best oyster-related experience was when I was touring my first album. We went to a restaurant in Seattle that had a girl swinging on a trapeze in the middle of the room. We thought it appropriate to order the oysters and they came on this bed of pink vinegar-infused crushed ice that you scooped on.

What made you devote the song to this particular mollusc? 
TV: Olga wrote the words, but to me it's about the metaphor “The world is your oyster,” though thinking about that it's quite an odd one—like There’s all this slimy shit to go through with the slim chance of a pearl. Maybe there has always been a smarmy sentiment attached to it, which I always like in a lyric.

OB: They are the best. What else cleans up a dirty harbor, makes pearls, and is an excellent source of iron? The humble oyster.