Virgin Kids are one of those bands you really have to see live in order to experience fully. Their garage sound pulls influence from post-punk and West Coast soft rock, and they've been compared to a highlight in Black Lips' career. Pretty good, then. Their debut album Greasewheel, released last week, captures the jubilant highs and nightmarish lows of young life in all its broke-ass, pizza for breakfast, digging down the back of the couch for loose change sort of glory. Kind of like FIDLAR, if they'd grown up in London instead of California.We're premiering their video for "Cracks in a Colour" below, which follows two dancers thrashing their way around a council estate in drag. According to the band, the track was written and inspired by Dario Argento's 1977 horror cult classic Suspiria, which follows a young female dancer starting a class at a ballet academy that houses a series of surreal murders (and is also lowkey run by witches). "Cracks in a Colour" was directed by Joseph Daniel Wilson, a film maker who has spent the last four years documenting the East London drag scene."We asked Joseph to do a video for us having seen him perform and document the drag scene in London over the past couple years," the band told Noisey over email. "We really wanted a video that featured contemporary dance and thought that getting drag dancers involved would be a welcome change from the stereotypical 'macho lad rock' approach that you tend to see in the garage rock scene.""When I first heard 'Cracks in a Colour', I immediately envisioned a race," Wilson told us, "The steady verses paced perfectly in-between full energy choruses. I loved it. I have a strong interest in documenting the East London drag scene so the idea to contrast drag and punk was almost instant. With so many gay bars closing, typically ‘straight’ spaces are being taken over by the thriving queer scene. With this in mind, I was attracted to the idea of mixing the two genres up. I saw Virgin Kids play last year and, as expected, the crowd was full of grungy skater kids smashing their hair back and forth whilst repetitively jumping up and down as if stuck on a trampoline. I closed my eyes and slowly started pivoting my wrists around as if pushing away thick air. I thought about the colourful nights, the eccentric looks and the passion for music that is endless amongst the drag scene. The music video follows two dancers, Chester and Jason, as they break free from their suffocating habitats. Their journey. I had assistetd on a shoot at The Trelick tower last year and loved the brutalist 70’s architecture and really wanted to include the building in a project of my own."Watch below.Greasewheel is out now via Burger Records (US) and Fluffer Records (UK).
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