Chicago’s French Inhaler have a new video for “Haunt You”, and they’ve brought in someone bassist Adam O’Leary has wanted to work with for years. The Logan Square trio play synth-pop and post-punk with live bass and drums, and their latest video stars Charles Joseph Smith, a pianist, composer and dancer who’s been a familiar face around Chicago’s DIY scene for decades.
Adam first met Charles at a local gig a couple of years ago. He’d gone to watch some bands when Charles showed up and started dancing, doing what Adam remembers as a wild mix of ballet and burlesque.
“He was completely entranced in the music and either unaware of the people around him or just unbothered.”
Charles also had a backpack full of books he’d written and published himself.
There were manuals for DIY bands and venues, first-person accounts of gigs with dates and events carefully arranged in chronological order, and hand-illustrated drawings of his own choreographed dances. Adam bought one of the books and got his contact details.
“I didn’t know when or how, but I knew I was gonna work with him one day.”
Fast forward to the promotion of French Inhaler’s debut album, “Practiced Lines“. The band had started receiving occasional emails from TikTok influencers offering to make paid dance videos to their music. Adam remembered Charles.
“Influencers are lame. If we’re gonna make a video of someone dancing for us, it’s gotta be Charles.”
So he got in touch, Charles was happy to do it, and the video came together at Elastic Arts in Logan Square, a small community space that regularly hosts local musicians and performers.
The whole shoot took under four hours. Adam worked with Nikki O’Leary and a very small crew, filming on an iPhone 12 with a gimbal. They rented some lights, hired a local florist to make the wreath seen in the video, and kept the rest of the setup pretty simple.
Charles has quite a history of his own. He’s been performing, dancing and selling his self-published music and writing at Chicago shows since the mid-1990s. In April this year, Sooper Records released “Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts”, a collection spanning 30 years of recordings, from concert piano and improvisation to electronic experiments and his science-fiction opera. His writing includes the 2021 autobiography “The 88 Keys That Opened Doors”.
There’s another small connection here. Charles celebrated that record with a release show at Elastic Arts on May 2, just a few months before returning to the space to film with French Inhaler.
As for “Haunt You” itself, it’s the fourth track on French Inhaler’s debut, with a melodic, Cure-like bass line, busy drums and synths that grow fuller as the song moves along. Ashvin Prakash handles vocals and synths, Adam plays bass and sings backing vocals, and Zane Chao is on drums. The whole thing has that slightly restless, danceable quality that runs through much of the album.
We spent quite a bit of time with the band back in August for our earlier feature on French Inhaler and the making of their debut. We got into their guitar-free setup, recording to analogue tape at Westtown Magnetics in December 2025, some wonderfully odd studio moments and the Logan Square venues and bands they’ve been playing alongside. Check that out if you’re new to them.
“Haunt You” comes from “Practiced Lines”, released on August 13, 2026 through LittleHEADbutt. You can find the full album on Bandcamp and watch the new video above.
And Charles? A couple of years after Adam spotted him dancing at a local show, he’s now dancing in a French Inhaler video. Pretty much what Adam had in mind when he took his number.
