Hercules & Love Affair try to talk to you

Hercules & Love Affair dropped the video for their new single recently, and the result is a little more than impressive.

“I Try to Talk to You” was directed by David Wilson, who has worked on music videos with Lady Gaga, Arctic Monkeys and Metronomy in the past. But the real prize of this video is owed to Ryan Heffington, whose exquisite choreography manages to make an already strong lead single sound like it was composed as a soundtrack. The video stars two gifted and offensively handsome dancers in a sort of cat-and-mouse game. Wilson’s camera work is dizzying and its relationship to the movement of the dancers is flawlessly coherent.

“I Try to Talk to You” features John Grant as guest lyricist and vocalist. He also guests on another track on the forthcoming record, The Feast of the Broken Heart. Andy Butler, the mind behind Hercules & Love Affair, says Grant didn’t take the commission of working with the band lightly.

“I asked John to dig deep with his lyrical contribution,” Butler says in the press release for the video. “I had no idea he would dig so deep. He tackled the story of becoming HIV-positive, and while I mentioned to him that he did not need to go there if he was not comfortable, in that beautifully punky, spirited and courageous way he has about him, he told me that was what the song was going to be about. What came of it is an elegant song featuring John pouring his heart out.”

The video was co-produced by System magazine and SSense, an online retailer that used its site as the platform for the video. The site also facilitated the video for Sky Ferreira’s “I Blame Myself.”

Hercules & Love Affair are touring in support of their new record and will perform at WorldPride.
The Feast of the Broken Heart will be released on Tues, May 27.