Videos

GHLOW release ‘Not Fit For This’

• 13th Apr 2021

GHLOW’s ‘Not Fit For This’ features on the Russian-Swedish duo’s debut album ‘Slash and Burn’, just released via PNKSLM Recordings, and now they’ve released a music video for the single to match the audio. Spliced and distorted footage of the duo and various vignettes make for an abstract feast for the eyes. Say the band: “Not Fit For This is a fast paced manifesto embracing raw power, materializing the energy that grows out of frustration and boredom. We wanted the video to translate the energy of the music and worked with our amazing friends over at Gonz TV who kept it fast paced and punky.”

The video’s director Maikel Gonzalez says “Around the same time I listened to the first single from GHLOW’s debut album I discovered this “video synth super machine” at a friend’s studio. Perfect timing! The next day I talked to GHLOW and they loved the aesthetics and the idea of making a music video with it.”  

The extremely current energy the track manifests provides a towering opener to the album which features punk thrashes that cut along at breakneck speed. The beats are piercingly polished, setting up dramatic juxtapositions of sound when paired with scuzzy, effects-drenched guitar that recalls the alt-rock of the nineties, a decade crucially formative for both members of GHLOW.

‘Not Fit For This’ has already garnered attention across the globe with respected Seattle radio station KEXP making it their Track of The Day and Jack Saunders spinning the single on his BBC Radio 1 Future Artists show. 

For Emille de Blanche and Nikolay Evdokimov, their first album as GHLOW represents a rebirth. Both are multidisciplinary creatives; de Blanche works primarily in sculpture, whilst Evdokimov is a tattoo artist. Both have colourful musical backgrounds stretching back decades; de Blanche is a former child prodigy violinist who took up the instrument at the age of two, while Evdokimov, a Russian native, formed his first, politically-charged bands in the early nineties, against the backdrop of the fall of the Soviet Union. 

de Blanche’s razor-sharp lyricism blends the personal and political to stirring effect, and ‘Slash and Burn’ could be read as a cutting treatise on Sweden in 2020. She’s keen to leave the interpretation to the listener, though, and the pair insist that her words are only one part of what is a scorched-earth mission statement – a manifesto announcing a powerful new moment both for themselves and for rock music. “There’s a rawness and a violence to ‘Slash and Burn’, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing,” says Evdokimov. “It’s about starting again. You might be chopping things down, or setting fire to something, but that’s a reset – something positive comes out of the flames.”