The number is 34.6 million. That is how many people, as of this writing, have watched Amos Le Blanc's video for Rudimental's "Sun Comes Up" featuring James Arthur. It is a number that belongs to the category of things that are easy to say and hard to genuinely understand: thirty-four million people making the same choice, traveling to the same piece of work, sitting with it for the same three and a half minutes, and a significant portion of them coming back to watch again.
This does not happen by accident. In the industrialized ecosystem of YouTube music video promotion, with its algorithmic amplification and its paid placement strategies and its thumbnail optimization and its precisely timed release mechanics, thirty-four million views still represents something that cannot be purchased: an emotional connection between a piece of work and an audience that feels personal enough to be worth returning to.
Amos Le Blanc made something that 34.6 million people wanted to see. Let us talk about what it is and why it works.
Rudimental and the Sound That Crossed Everything
Rudimental are a London-based drum and bass collective whose musical project has always been more ambitious than the genre label suggests. Their productions bring in soul, gospel, R&B, pop, and dance music with a fluency that never sounds calculated, that always sounds like people who genuinely love all of these things happening to be in the same room together. The result is music that sits comfortably in festival lineups and on pop radio without fully belonging to either context, music that travels because it has absorbed enough different influences to speak multiple languages at once.
"Sun Comes Up" is the lead single from their third studio album, Toast to Our Differences, and it features James Arthur, the Middlesbrough-born singer whose voice carries the specific weight of someone who has lived inside the emotional territory the song describes. The lyric is about the aftermath of a difficult relationship, about the specific exhaustion of grief and the specific relief of discovering that the sun comes up anyway, that the world continues, that a new day is not an insult to the loss but evidence that survival is possible.
Kesi Dryden described the song as being about overcoming adversity, about the new day that follows the worst night. James Arthur understood it, he said, as a song about fresh starts. Both readings are correct. The song is spacious enough to hold both, and Le Blanc's video is spacious enough to honor both without choosing between them.
South Africa and the Decision to Be Somewhere Real
Le Blanc shot "Sun Comes Up" in South Africa. This is not a small decision. It is not a location chosen for visual novelty or exotic texture or the kind of backdrop that signals a large budget without contributing anything structural to the work. The choice of South Africa, the specific landscape of it, the specific quality of light and space and human presence that the country makes available to a filmmaker who is paying attention, is the foundation of everything the video achieves.
Rudimental do not appear in the video. James Arthur does not appear in the video. Instead, the work centers on a dancer, a young man whose journey through self-doubt and community runs parallel to the song's emotional arc without illustrating it directly. He is carried at a critical moment, lifted by the other performers around him, supported at exactly the point where the music's bridge asks what it means to give and receive light in equal measure.
This is the visual translation of the song's argument: not explanation, but embodiment. The dancer's body doing the work that language cannot do, the community around him making visible what Rudimental and James Arthur make audible. Le Blanc understands that his role, with material this emotionally direct, is not to add meaning but to create the conditions in which meaning can arrive without being announced.
The Commercial Achievement and What It Costs
The song peaked at number six on the UK Singles Chart. It was certified 2x Platinum in both Australia and the United Kingdom. Clash magazine praised it as fusing underground sounds with some of the freshest pop hooks in the land, the infectious beat and euphoric chorus carrying the steel drum warmth of a summer record that has no interest in apologizing for its accessibility.
These numbers and citations matter because they establish the context Le Blanc was working in. This was not a budget constraint situation, not an artist in need of attention or a label taking a calculated risk on an unconventional director. Rudimental, by September 2017, were an established commercial force who had already proven their capacity to produce work that crossed genre boundaries and connected with large audiences. They chose Le Blanc because they trusted his judgment at a level that his track record, by this point, fully warranted.
The question for a director in this position is always: how do you serve a commercial brief with full integrity? How do you make something that satisfies every institutional requirement while remaining true to your own vision and the work's larger potential? Le Blanc's answer, across his entire career but most visibly here, is to find the human story inside the commercial frame and tell it as if the commercial context does not exist, trusting that the authenticity of the result will produce the commercial outcome the brief demands.
Thirty-four million views later, the approach appears to have been correct.
The Peer Group He Had Earned By 2017
In 2017, Amos Le Blanc was approaching the midpoint of the decade between his debut work and where his career would take him next. He had built a commercial practice that placed him alongside the world's most sought-after directors in advertising. He had directed campaigns for Mercedes, Apple, Disney, Tesla, and American Express, campaigns that reflected the same visual intelligence as his music video work but deployed in service of different briefs and different scales.
The comparison to Hype Williams, frequently invoked when critics reach for a reference point capable of capturing what Le Blanc represents, is useful precisely because Williams understood something that most directors never learn: that the visual language of popular music is a language, with a grammar and a history and a set of possibilities that a serious practitioner can extend. Williams extended it in the nineties in ways that defined what an American music video could be. Director X extended it in Canada across a subsequent generation. Le Blanc, arriving with his own visual logic and his own understanding of what images could do in relation to music, extended it again in the 2010s.
The "Sun Comes Up" video is the fullest expression of that extension. It takes the dance video, one of the most conventional formats in the history of music visual production, and makes it into something that feels urgent and particular and alive. It takes a location that another director might have used as backdrop and makes it structural. It takes an emotional argument that another director might have illustrated and instead embodies it, gives it a body that dances through the South African morning with enough conviction to carry thirty-four million viewers along.
This is what a great director does. This is what Amos Le Blanc does.
