Brooklyn-based duo girlyboi hearken back to a different time in New York—a time of freewheeling lovers writing songs from their hearts and eking art out of daily life and dirty streets. Pulling sonically and lyrically from the blunted cool of big city predecessors The Velvet Underground (and a heaping helping of non-New Yorkers Fleetwood Mac), girlyboi's music cuts through the current crop of vocal chop hooks, trap drums, and empty throwback pop.
The video for the group's single "Love Hurts" plays an unsettling, intoxicating counterpoint to the song, at once accentuating its sorrowful tone while providing a buoyant optimism, hope through sheer will and acceptance of life's absurdity. It's a perspective decades of New York artists have channeled given fresh energy by a pair who've lived an international life as models making ends meet on the fly.
"When we wrote 'Love Hurts,' we were pretty tight fisted (still are) financially and had just moved back to New York," says Joe Matick, one half of girlyboi and real-life boyfriend of groupmate Carly Russ. "Josh Smith of Gosh Pith came over and started riffing. Lyrically, the content of the track is pretty bleak until the overarching sentiment comes through…to dance through the pain, the heartache, the tough shit…which is appropriately timed given all the unrest on a domestic level in this country. That was just coincidental timing."
Director Maciek Jasik captured girlyboi's vision with a stark vision that mesmerizes with its beautiful, lightly voyeuristic execution.
"When we met [Maciek], we quickly learned that he was charismatic, daring, enchanted, and a pyromaniac," continues Matick. "A few days later we broke into an abandoned military base, lit some smoke bombs and filmed this video."
Watch "Love Hurts" above.
