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Music

First Hate Are Dream-Like in Their "A Prayer for the Unemployed" Video

We're premiering the Copenhagen duo's synthy title track from their debut album.
Lauren O'Neill
London, GB

Copenhagen synth duo First Hate have a knack for making the mundane feel weirdly beautiful, kinda like a crack of morning light that hits the half-empty beer cans dotted about your living room the morning after the night before. They released album A Prayer for the Unemployed earlier this year, and the new video for its title track is another example of their ability to merge ordinary and ethereal. Luckily for you, we're premiering it today.

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If you're not familiar, "A Song for the Unemployed" carries all the best First Hate hallmarks. You've got band's omnipresent melodic nod to the 80s, and vocals that are at once commanding, wavering and sensitive. Where the video is concerned, the band – comprised of Anton Falck Gansted and Joakim Norgaard – tell me that it portrays a "love story from the afterlife", and is based on The Brothers Lionheart, a children's book by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren. "We always come up with the idea, visual concept and script all of our videos ourselves," they say. "We have our hands in everything and overlook every process. We do everything together – from management, to videos, to all the music and lyrics which we produce together 50/50."

This creative control is pretty clear, as the video and track are pretty consistent with the rest of the band's output: the song, which they say is "about letting go of fear, about praying together, about wishing for something so deep that you will get it," is oddly transcendent, though the message it expresses is rooted firmly in real life. And the video does something similar: visually it's soft and delicately lit, featuring sweeping landscape shots, but its depiction of a relationship is full of real-feeling sweetness and idiosyncrasy.

Perhaps that's down to the personal nature of the video-making process. "We shot it a few months ago with our two good friends Nina and Kenny as the main characters," they told me, which worked well because "Nina did our first video ever to the song "In My Dreams" where she dances alone in her room". This familiarity feels tangible, and it works even more to the song's advantage, with its balance of beauty and reality.

I've always found First Hate to be a particularly special band – they bring more heart to their music than their scene peers Iceage and Lust for Youth – and "A Prayer for the Unemployed" and its video encapsulates why that is. Its blend of honesty and rose-tint reflect life back at you, but with a little more light, and a little more drama (listen to that chorus and tell me I'm wrong). That's what I think the best music always does, and its a characteristic that seems innate in the very bones of First Hate.

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