OK Go Went Viral on Treadmills 20 Years Ago. How They Still Find Joy in Music Videos (Exclusive) – ryan

• OK Go went viral almost 20 years ago for dancing on treadmills in the “Here It Goes Again” music video
• The music video “Love” from their new album And The Adjacent Possible features 29 robots and 60 mirrors
• Their music videos, whether they feature dogs or antigravity or dozens of videos on dozens of iPhones, continue to bring joy to viewers

You’re lying if you’ve never been in awe of an OK Go music video.

Damian Kulash and Tim Nordwind speak exclusively with PEOPLE about their evolution as a band since going viral for dancing on treadmills in the “Here It Goes Again” music video to their latest from their album And the Adjacent Possible, “Love,” which they consider their “most complicated” with 29 robots and 60 mirrors.

For those unfamiliar with the music video that broke the internet, OK Go — comprised of lead singer-guitarist Kulash, bassist Nordwind, multi-instrumentalist Andy Ross and drummer Dan Konopka — danced to their song “Here It Goes Again” on eight treadmills set up in rows of four in alternating directions.

They won the Grammy for Best Music Video in 2007 and the music video has since been played over 67 million times on YouTube. Twenty years later, they still find joy in creating music videos to accompany their music and, well, playing.

Nordwind, 48, tells PEOPLE that when working on the 2006 music video, “there was no precedent” for making a music video dancing on treadmills. “We were able to rent a treadmill, but then it was like, okay, well, what are we going to do with these things?” he says. “How do you even position them? What do you do?”

Kulash, 49, agrees. “It’s hard for us to put things in terms of what’s challenging enough because our process is basically figure out what the boundaries of the sandbox are and then see if you can play in the entire sandbox.”

“This one is just four dudes in a room with treadmills. There’s no props, there’s no cuts, there’s no costume changes, there’s no acting.” OK Go spent “eight days hurling” themselves at the exercise machines to figure out what exactly they could do. And the rest is history.

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Reflecting how the music video changed their lives, Nordwind embraces the joy that came along with it. “Something that was really nice about the treadmills and everything like that was the feeling that was transferred was a joyful one, which was pretty exciting to us.”

“That’s part of what I think we wanted to continue on with, and I think we have continued on with throughout the years, is being able to make things that are emotional and that oftentimes fall into the category of joy.”

This mentality leant itself to their other music videos, such as their latest, “Love.” “Not only is it joyful, but it’s also very, very elegant and beautiful,” Nordwind adds.

With “Love,” which Kulash says is his understanding of how love changed when he had kids, the band employed 29 robots and 60 mirrors to film the music video in a train station in Budapest. With precision, optical illusions and pigeons flying around while they worked in 35-degree weather to create a dazzling video.

“It’s a much more technical and much less goofy and much less dance heavy type of choreography,” Kulash says, “but it’s the same basic process, which is play, play, play, play, play until you feel like you really know all that can be done with this idea and then plan.”

In between treadmills and robot-mirror choreography, OK Go has worked with dogs in “White Knuckles,” planned an anti-gravity routine for “Upside Down and Inside Out” — which has soothed Nordwind’s flight anxiety — built a Rube Goldberg machine for “This Too Shall Pass” and used 64 videos on 64 iPhones to create the music video for “A Stone Only Rolls Downhill.”

All of them are joyful, amazing viewers with mind-bending visuals while embracing organized chaos. “When you watch a whole bunch of our videos in a row, you see a different story than you do in any one of them,” Kulash explains.

“And it’s like all of them are about the precision of destruction and chaos, being very careful about setting something up that can then go absolutely berserk in unintended ways.”

Working on the sets of these elaborate music videos is no different. Their sets are contagious with their “giddy” energy, Kulash says. “There’s rare moments when it’s just like there’s a space to play and that’s all we’re asking you to do is take this as far as you can and have fun with it.”

“If you really want to have that moment of creative joy, that we’re going somewhere that no one’s ever been before, this is like, we get to do this crazy thing, it takes that effort and that’s what our sets are usually like.”

The goalposts have shifted for the band in terms of what they do with their music videos, which are getting “much bigger and crazier and weirder,” according to Kulash. “If it’s not exciting and challenging and weird and fun for us, what’s the point?”

Looking back on their innovative and joyful music videos, Kulash reveals how it feels to be known as the “treadmill guys” thanks to “Here It Goes Again.”  “We’re totally aware of the fact that that’s the thing that precedes us. How could it not?”

“We were lucky to be at the right place at the right time to have something like that be a part of the change in culture from this top-down Viacom world to this bottom-up YouTube world. And it has opened up this 25 year career of making music videos that nobody else gets to do.”

“We have this little corner of the industry which is making insane process our projects that I feel so lucky we get to do that and they allow for us, our band to exist in a way that others don’t,” he concludes. “So we have no qualms about it, but it is funny that that’s the thing.”

And The Adjacent Possible is available to stream.