8. Patrick Praman – ‘REAL Skateboards Presents’

Fresh out the factory that seems to steadily produce fully formed Deluxe ams, Thailand-by-way-of-Virginia handrail threat Patrick Praman applies some feline-type landings, a mean pointer grind and the audacity to put a backside noseblunt down Miami’s fearsome Challenger memorial triangle in the middle of this arrival-announcing vid for Real earlier this year. This kid likes his handrail tricks super hard — the fakie ollie to switch frontside feeble grind, the nollie frontside crooked grind up against the wall, backside over-crook backside 180 out — and his nollie heelflips hopped really high, whilst continuing the recent string of potential ‘Blue Velvet’ soundtrack outtakes also run by Elijah Berle and Ronnie Sandoval.

5. Cory Kennedy – “Pretty Sweet”

Cory Kennedy projects a stony bro love for lakeshore living, jet-skis and macro brews, but watching his footage evolve over the years I think he really likes to watch Jake Johnson parts, and not just because he’s out there this year pushing his wallrides all over the place. Coming out of the Northwest Cory Kennedy has some grasp on grit and it was a pleasant surprise to see all the double-sided parking block twister tricks offset by crunchier fare like the fakie ollie out to backside 50-50, the hairy frontside k-grind and the fakie b/s nosegrind 180, moves that that also seemed calculated to combat all those backlit golden-boy profiling shots. He gets Love Park bonus points for the pop-up panel to the bench and in a video drenched with questionable ledge combos the crooked grind drop-down to switch frontside crooked grind ranks somewhere in the top ten. For these dudes like Cory Kennedy who can do it all it really comes down to what tricks go into their parts and there gets to be almost too many to list from this one, ranging from the switch bigspin to the fakie flip cracked backside over the handrail to the bigspin backside tailslide to fakie on the hubba to the nollie inward heelflip backside tailslide to fakie which, on paper, sounds terrible but became among the most-rewound tricks the first few passes through this video. The backside tailslide kickflip to backside tailslide remains zany.