The grooving new alt-pop track ,’Love Is Enough’, arrives with another charming Alex Cantouris-directed music video that sees the band suit up alongside their instruments, channelling a funky disco bassline and an alluringly danceable melody in front of the city backdrop. Speaking about the accompanying video, Sophie from the band said: “The concept for the video first came from wanting to look like city finance bros. The kind of people that tear through six Elfbar vapes in a day and passive aggressively tell our assistants over the phone to make sure the cappuccino was hot by the time it got to our desks next time. We got up at 3am and went to the iconic spot right by the entrance of the Blackwall tunnel to get a view of the skyline. As the shoot went on, we thought maybe we looked like budget spies or the Blues Brothers. By 6am a guy in a small vest who looked like he’d been out all night asked if we were in an orchestra.”

Alex, the director, said: “We decided to take a more earnest approach with this video, due to the song’s subject matter. Poppy found an amazing location, and riffing off the idea that the band might actually be going to work in the city, Iris came up with the great idea to wear business attire. The costume element is of course tongue in cheek, which got us thinking we could have some fun with the intro to balance out the rest of the video’s feel. We filmed at 4am, and the monochrome qualities of the light combined with the black and white suits, and Canary Wharf as the backdrop, really gelled well together to get the look of sincerity we were aiming to achieve.”

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About the track, which is another refreshing slice of addictive disco-pop, the band’s guitarist and lead singer, Poppy Hankin, said: “Written at the beginning of my current relationship, ‘Up’ deals with all the emotions of a fledgling romance: adoration, self-doubt, and everything in between! Musically we wanted to pay homage to the sparseness of Queen’s ‘Cool Cat’, and the groove of Bowie’s ‘Fame’”.

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Prestige is the sound of Girl Ray reclaiming disco music as the celebration of sexuality and outsider culture it started out as. Inspired by Pose, the television drama about New York City’s queer ballroom scene in the 80s, Prestige is an escape to a fantasy clubland, it’s dancing with your friends, it’s falling in love. In fact, the overarching narrative of Prestige is love: falling in it and being afraid of getting hurt by it; being all alone and longing for it; the tensions between what it is and what you imagined it would be.

The London three-piece today also share their latest single, ‘Hold Tight’, along with a video directed by their long term collaborator, Alex Cantouris. With the lyrics “Call me when you want to get a coke and sit on the wall”, it feels like a gigantic Wordsworthian declaration of love. Poppy said the following about the track, “Lyrically this songs is about how appreciative I am to have found my partner, and how my mental load feels so much lighter and easier to bear now that I’m with her. The production on this takes some inspiration from Haim’s incredible record Women in Music Pt. III, and features a subby drum loop inspired by Atlanta’s hip hop scene.”

Speaking of the video, Poppy said “Despite being caught in heavy rain the whole day, falling over in the mud countless times, and Alex constantly holding an umbrella over the camera, this video was so much fun to make, and we will remember it as one of our favourite shoots.”

Director Alex Cantouris explained “To mark the 8th video me and Girl Ray have done together, and to celebrate almost 10 years of working alongside each other, we thought what better way to honour the occasion than to drive seven hours to the Lake District and spend a whole day filming in the rain. Fortunately the rain made the perfect backdrop for us to combine our theme of Bananarama meets 19th century Western aesthetic. Frankly, once cow patterned clothes were mentioned, the video really made itself.”

Prestige:

1. Intro
2. True Love
3. Up
4. Everybody’s Saying That
5. Love Is Enough
6. Hold Tight
7. Begging You Now
8. Easy
9. Tell Me
10. Wanna Dance
11. Space Song
12. Give Me Your Love

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About the track, the band’s guitarist and lead singer, Poppy Hankin, who co-produced it with the Grammy Award-winning producer, Ben H. Allen (M.I.A, Gnarls Barkley, Christina Aguilera, Deerhunter), said: “The lyrics on this single were inspired by the straight-to-the-heart simplicity of the disco greats. I wrote it while missing my partner while on tour in 2020, and it plays on themes of new love and self-doubt. Musically we took reference from the nu-disco resurgence that seemed to be taking off in 2020, in particular from the likes of Kylie Minogue (Disco), Jessie Ware (What’s Your Pleasure?), Dua Lipa (Future Nostalgia) and Róisín Murphy (Róisín Machine). We were really inspired by all of these women re-imagining disco.”

About the video she added, “We met Alice, the director, while we were all working in a coffee truck on film sets over the pandemic. Alice is the special kind of person you can put total faith in and know she’ll make something amazing, so when she agreed to direct our video we were beyond excited. We wanted the video to have an emphasis on atmosphere and colour rather than narrative to fit in with the feel of the song, which Alice achieved wonderfully. Lyrically the song is about longing, and even though it was filmed in Slough, the video has pure Hollywood vibes thanks to a hugely talented cast and crew, and countless favours that Alice managed to pull in. We hope you enjoy it.”

The director, Alice Harding, added, “It was such a pleasure to direct this video for Girl Ray. We forayed into the underground to a party harking back to the halcyon days of Studio 54 – in a boy-meets-boy story of love, lust, music and pure 70’s disco joy.”

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