Venus Twins, the Brooklyn Punk Duo Who Appear in Olivia Rodrigo’s New Video

Venus Twins built their reputation in New York clubs, playing scuzzy glam-punk and noise-pop and appearing in the live lineup of Fantasy of a Broken Heart while releasing their own music. The identical twins Jake and Matt Derting now turn up somewhere considerably larger: Olivia Rodrigo’s video for the “Expectations” remix with Chappell Roan, cast as members of Rodrigo’s team in a Family Feud-style contest.

The job arrived through a casting agent roughly a month earlier, and the brief was deliberately vague. Jake told Rolling Stone it referenced a “Grammy-winning artist” without naming anyone. Matt remembered the call asking for “interesting-looking people and punks.” They learned the video belonged to Rodrigo the night before the shoot, and only then heard about Roan.

Filming took place at a warehouse studio in Astoria, Queens, with something like 100 people on set, a scale far removed from the duo’s usual operation. An hour of hair and makeup went into the look. David Byrne plays a game-show host in the video and producer Dan Nigro supplies a robot voice, but the twins are the detail aimed at anyone tracking the city’s rock underground. They had prior screen experience too, having appeared in a 2024 MrBeast episode that gathered 100 identical twins.

For a band operating largely outside the pop machinery, the cameo is a strange and useful collision. Their phones have not stopped. Whether that attention converts into anything beyond a week of notifications is a different question, and not one a music video settles.