Today, `Belgian five-piece Whispering Sons have shared a new live video for their recent single "Surface".
The band's return last week saw their new limited edition 7" sell out of all 500 copies in half a day, as well as earning plaudits from a vast array publications, with CLASH calling them "bold, dark and immersive", and The Line Of Best Fit describing the track as a "confounding, confusing and continually climaxing song of dead-ends, narrowing avenues and night-time awareness."
"Surface" marks Whispering Sons first new material since their 2018 debut "Image", which saw them garner early support at press and radio as well as tallying up millions of streams for their dark and unique blend of experimental and frenetic post-punk. Similarly, prior to lockdown, their infamously ferocious live shows had also seen them begin to firmly cement themselves as a must-see live band playing alongside the likes of The Murder Capital, Patti Smith, The Soft Moon and Croatian Amor as well as touring across the UK and Europe with the likes of Editors.
Whispering Sons live performance of the new single sees the band flooded by threatening red light. Filmed in one shot, the entrancing the new video perfectly exemplifies the powerful vehemence of the band's live shows, capturing their raw emotion and brooding energy.
Having retreated to the Ardennes last summer to work on new material, the band took the strongest parts of their old work and refined them even further with a strong focus on their greatest strength – sheer, unpretentious intensity. The result of this work can be seen clearly in their latest single. “Surface” refines the ferocious post-punk aesthetics from which their sound first emerged and pushes them to the absolute limit. Combining elements of no wave, industrial and avant-punk, the anxious and propulsive instrumentation is relentless and eerily abstracted, whilst Fenne Kuppens’ words, sung in a dramatic and distinctive low register (inspired in part by the likes Xiu Xiu and Chinawoman), inject that extra, central tension and darkness.
The single was also accompanied by an official video. Combining bleak and jarring imagery, the band say "the theme of isolation in a cyclical and circling world was used by combining images of a woman singing in bright white light alongside flashing sceneries of destruction, a lost city, stone formations and rough structured landscapes. It’s the result of an instinctive search by photographer Sybren Vanoverberghe and filmmaker Jonas Hollevoet for images in which no humanity can be found.
WATCH THE VIDEO FOR "SURFACE": Whispering Sons - Surface (Official Video) - YouTube