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PREMIERE: London's HÆLOS Drop Two Darkly Cinematic New Videos - "Pray" and "Dust"

We talk to the London trio about their darkly euphoric tunes—the perfect soundtrack to the end of a party when you're watching the sun come up.

London trio HÆLOS make woozy yet euphoric trip-hop tunes that recalls 90s pioneers Massive Attack and Portishead without ever feeling like pastiche. The moment that band members Arthur Delaney, Dom Goldsmith, and Lotti Benardout sang in unison for the first time, they "sort of realized that we'd got onto something a bit special"—and when they dropped debut track "Dust" last October, their distinctive three-part harmonies enchanted the hell out of us too.

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As the hypnotic "Dust" bounced from blog to blog in late 2014 and early 2015, it almost felt compulsory to describe the trio as "mysterious" or "enigmatic." But as Arthur, Dom, and Lotti tell us today, it was more accident than plan. (More on that later, though.) Chatting to HÆLOS over Skype, they're straightforward and friendly, but firm and focused too. They're tight-lipped on the release date of their debut full length, but today we're stoked to premiere two new videos, "Pray" and "Dust." Along with the previously-released clip for "Earth Not Above," these videos form a striking, evocative, and cinematic trilogy created with director Jesse Jenkins, whose previous collaborators include Peace and The Vaccines. These guys certainly aren’t lacking in ambition. At the start of our interview, Arthur explains that "with HÆLOS, it kind of feels like the universe is unfolding for us and it’s just meant to be," so we dig a little deeper in a bid to find out why.

Part I: "Earth Not Above"

Noisey: So how did the three of you actually form HÆLOS?
Arthur: Well, Lotti had been working with Dom on a project over a period of time, and Dom and I were working on a project too, and then I accidentally moved in on the same road as him…

Dom: It kind of got to that point where the two projects felt like they were one, I suppose. They just merged and HÆLOS was borne out of that. “Dust” was the first song we made as a three-piece.

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Did you instantly click as three-piece?
Lotti: I think so. Arthur and I had listened to each other’s stuff, but we’d never actually met. When you write with someone for the first time, it's a bit like a first date, you don’t know if you’re going to get on. But it all just flowed so easily. That first session felt like a really electric moment.

Arthur: People who come into our inner sanctum always say, woah, there’s a weird energy between the three of us, and they can’t quite put their finger on it. There’s something very creative between the three of us that even we can’t explain.

Lotti: I think we very much compliment each other's strengths and weaknesses. We collaborate fully on all the writing, but Arthur’s amazing at lyrics, I’m more melody-focused and Dom’s more production-focused. Obviously there’s overlap between the three areas, but making music as HÆLOS just feels like a very fluid process.

How would you describe your sound?
Dom: Kind of dark euphoria.

Lotti: We're going to coin that term!

Arthur: It's music you whack on in the morning at a party, you know? At 5am, just as the sun's coming up.

Dom: That's exactly it—because that moment can feel really good, or really bad, and sometimes both. In a way it's a snapshot of wider life. At that time of the morning, under those circumstances, sometimes life can just give you everything at once.

Part II: "Pray"

Is writing as a band an emotional experience?
Dom: Definitely. I think there's a darkness to HÆLOS because we've all arrived at this point with a lot of life under our belts. You know, we’ve all been through various experiences of living life to the full, so we now have all this pent up real life stuff waiting to come out.

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Lotti: And digging deeper to bring out those emotions can be painful.

Dom: Yeah, I suppose you dig around for things you feel a bit ashamed about: experiences that were negative, times when you were a complete dick and you got things wrong, you know? It was really important for us to have that honesty, but obviously it doesn't feel good remembering times when you didn't get things quite right.

You're premiering two videos with us today—the second and third parts of a trilogy. Where did the idea to make a trilogy come from?
Arthur: Weirdly enough, it came about because we were desperate to shoot on 16mm film for the aesthetic value. Because of budgetary constraints and stuff, we thought, fuck, why don't we just shoot them all at once?

Lotti: And we liked the idea of having the overriding themes from the album run across a trilogy of videos, rather than having one-off videos for each track.

Arthur: The director, Jesse Jenkins, wrote the treatments for the videos while listening to songs from our album on loop. Each treatment wasn't written to a specific track; it was written to the Haelos sound as a whole. The videos were eventually shot with these three specific tracks in mind, but they were inspired by the overriding themes from our album.

Dom: Which is pretty unique, I think.

Continued below.

Part III: "Dust"

The videos don't tell an obvious story, but there's definitely a loose narrative to the trilogy. How would you describe that?

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Dom:

I guess at a really simple level, it’s about a very human thing—it’s about a break-up between a boy and a girl.

Arthur: But the overall theme to the videos, the word that kept coming up during production, is release. Over the three videos, the boy and the girl both find their own way of letting go and transcending their situation and finding something more.

Lotti: All three videos have those moments of release. In the second video, "Pray," there's a part where the male character peels down a metal blind and lets the light in. In the third video, "Dust," we see him expressing his feelings through dance: at first he’s expressing a kind of inner conflict, but then there’s real release at the end.

Obviously you guys don't appear in this video trilogy, but could you appear in Haelos videos in the future?
Lotti: I think we want the music to do the talking initially, but going forward, we're definitely open to appearing in our videos—it's not something we’re closing off. But we definitely didn't want the three of us to be part of this trilogy.

Arthur: We wanted it to feel like a little piece of cinema.

When you dropped "Dust" about a year ago, you kind of got branded a mysterious band. Are you keen to maintain some of that mystery?
Arthur: We honesty didn't plan to be a mysterious band—we just didn't have a press photo at first. As soon as we had one taken, we put it out there.

Dom: What happened was, we were just feeling a bit bored on, like, a Tuesday afternoon, so we decided to put "Dust" online and it got picked up by some blogs. There was nothing at that point—literally just that one song. So in the absence of any more information, people started calling us mysterious.

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Lotti: We certainly never tried to hide who we were. On our own personal pages, we all said that this was a project we were working on, we were totally open about it.

Arthur: And as we’ve had more content, we’ve put it out there. We've just done what felt right as we’ve gone along. There's never been any considered effort to be mysterious.

Dom: I mean, we don’t walk around with hoods and masks on!

Do you have much of an idea yet who HÆLOS is connecting with?
Dom: It's difficult to say because we've kind of been in a bubble. We’ve had this weird monastic work effort while making the album.

Arthur: As soon as we got signed and had a bit of cash behind us, we were able to devote ourselves to HÆLOS full time. And we ended up doing it about six and half days a week…

Lotti: We basically said goodbye to our friends and family and partners and locked ourselves away. We're only just coming up for air now.

Where do you think work ethic comes from?
Dom: Maybe it's just the art of today reflecting the austerity of the era we’re living in. We like the feeling of being really disciplined and working hard to create something that we're really into.

Lotti: And prior to this project, we'd all maybe partied a bit too hard, so it felt good to go the other way and balance things out.

Arthur: I think we're fundamentally very driven and energetic people. We experimented with being different to that and it didn’t make us very happy.

Dom: When you make life about your art, your life just becomes richer and more intense. When your life's about avoiding things, it becomes a bit dull and shit. That's it. We're just much happier when we’re making stuff, I think.

Nick Levine is a writer living in London. Follow him on Twitter.