Dance music group Hercules and Love Affair have released a new music video for their track “Are You Still Certain,” featuring Mashrou Leila’s lead singer Hamed Sinno on vocals. This is the group’s latest music video for the album Omnion which was released in September of 2017 on Big Beat Records.
Sinno, who is from Lebanon, sings over the track in Arabic during the video as several vignettes from the band and other clips play in the background. A painter is shown in one clip, while a child is shown pointing off camera another, as the music video hosts a vintage aesthetic.
The video is directed by Joie Iacono and Hercules and Love Affair’s founder Andy Butler, which “pitches the cold hand of the law, the spectra of violence and innocence lost, as a timeless ever-present human struggle.” “Are You Still Certain,” is meant to calm cultural tensions, host themes of faith, truth and understanding, while tackling issues such as prejudice and cultural misconceptions.
“As an American of a certain age, the idea of the shadowy, dangerous Muslim has been around for much of my life,” Butler stated in a press release. “After chatting with Hamed at length, it cemented my hunch that I had a lot to learn from him and this collaboration. It was an opportunity to get perspective amid a lot of fear-mongering. I bought books about Islam and Islamophobia. Hamed and I, a few months later, were sitting in the studio, dealing with notions of spirituality. The lyrics for that song say, in Arabic essentially ‘You, who say you know the truth, how is the truth working for you? Are you still certain?”
Sinno further elaborated on these comments stating, “Hercules’s music was largely formative for us, and getting to finally work with Andy on this project was tremendously gratifying. It was especially wonderful to get to pick each other’s brains before and throughout the writing process, and recognizing the numerous ways in which our world-views overlapped, which provided that sense of empowered solidarity that really cuts through the music and lyrics.”
This music video comes a year after the release of the video for the title track “Ominon,” which featured Sharon Van Etten on vocals. Following similar themes of faith and acceptance, the video features Van Etten, following a divine light out a heavily structured interior, climbing up stairs leading out of a pool of water into a new, natural world by the end of the video.
Hercules and Love Affair began their career in New York City back in 2004, as a dance music project founded by Butler, who was a prominent DJ in the city. In 2008 the group released their first self-titled studio album on DFA Records, which was co-founded by LCD Soundsystem front-man James Murphy in 2001, who was also a prominent DJ in the New York scene at the time.
Since their inception the group has released four studio albums, with Ominon being released by Atlantic Records. The group will launch a tour for the album on September 19 with a show at the Foundry in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
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