You know that duality of pleasure and anxiety that comes when you're in the depths of a heavy weekend, but your mind's eye can't stop staring at the looming Monday ahead? It's a pretty awkward emotion to capture isn't it? For a start, you're usually too fucked to remember it, but evocative pop trio Real Lies somehow captured it perfectly in "World Peace" - a track that's as ravey as it is profound.
Annons
It's finally got a video to match, directed by Joe Alexander, and we're premiering it on Noisey. We caught up with the band over email to chat about symbolic loops, post-party thinking and the making of the video.Noisey: Yo Real Lies. A lot of your songs are born from the emotions that channel out of a time with pals. What made this song so special? Real Lies: We wrote it a couple of years ago, and it's about coming home from a night out, in that sort of grey area where night turns to day. You've had a great night out with your mates, but you know that soon you'll soon be getting into trouble with your missus, your boss, your flatmates, whoever else it is you're meant to be fresh-faced for the next morning. It's about knowing you've got those responsibilities, clocking them in your mind, and then cracking on anyway – to the next club, the next gatecrashed house party; forging your own path to the edges of the night. And then having to return to the real world, away from the fraternal wonderland you build for you and all your friends to behave like pricks in each night. It's about that eternal war between fun and responsibility – and what happens when you realise that, inevitably, fun has the bigger guns.You've got a rep for putting symbolic loops in your songs. Are there any secrets lurking in the instrumentation of "World Peace"?
There's a JL-Ponty arp loop, and also some stretched out percussive dog barks that we end up using in most of our songs. Pat sampled the barks, he's just got himself a real dog to stop people calling us out for not being authentic enough.
Annons
What made you choose Joe Alexander as your video director?
It's our third video with him. We only work with people who get totally what we're about. We're not in this to be paydays for some OK GO tosspot.What is it that Joe does though?
Well, this video tries to capture what the song is about: being up all night and then in the middle ground thinking about the positives and negatives of doing so. I guess in the first video the couple were hooking up, in this one things are definitely winding down a bit. TBF most of the house parties we go to end up with worried looking people on crutches pondering what life is all about.Where is the Real Lies vision heading?
We've almost finished writing our first album, which will come out next year. It's about friendship, ecstasy, and running over the police. We've just finished a new mix which we're calling Ethos and putting out very soon.And finally, since your lyrics allude to "the sweetest thing you've ever known", what actually is the sweetest thing you’ve ever known?
Spotting Martijn Reuser in an Ipswich McDonald's in 2001.Brilliant. Cheers guys.
