New video from SHE looks at the perils of forcing love.

As anybody who has ever read romantic poetry or listened to The Smiths will tell you, love is a natural and genuine thing. Yet as the majority of people who have experienced it will tell you, that romanticised ideal is seldom the reality. That probably explains why almost half of all relationships end bitterly.

Along the twisted path of love, there are several opportunities to synthetically enhance the experience or force it to work by various means. It’s this idea that forms the thematic backbone of SHE‘s debut single Body Talk, a rumbling indie-alternative-meets-electropop track that looks at how dysfunctional a forced relationship can become.

The single hits hard on two fronts. Musically, the track is a finely crafted song with a vibrant, 80s-indebted synth line at its heart and a rumbling alternative bassline setting a dark tone. In amongst this, there is of course the strong vocal display of frontwoman Rebecca Davies, whose husky voice gels perfectly with the crunchy guitars that accompany it.

The second success of the track comes from the video itself, which perfectly encapsulates the sentiment of the song into a bleak, pocket-sized narrative with no room for improvement. The depiction of a dead-eyed relationship being strung along through emotion-enhancing, aphrodisiac-styled drugs is one perfectly aligned with the single itself.

“The video for Body Talk is a window into the effects of synthetic love,” says Rebecca Davies. “By trying to find substitutes for something that should be so natural, we have turned the experience on its head and tainted it until our love birds become something more detestable than desirable.”