WL//WH Video Of The Day: CONTRE JOUR “This New World” (Official Video Clip)

Video Of The Day Contre Jour

“THIS NEW WORLD” expresses that unease through a deliberately simple image: words becoming so violent that they begin to resemble weapons. Conversations that no longer seek to understand, or even to encourage reflection, but simply to hurt. When talking is no longer enough. “THIS NEW WORLD” is not an invitation to escape the world, but to step back from it, refusing to let ourselves be consumed by this atmosphere. Instead, it is an invitation to preserve our freedom, our integrity, and our critical thinking. In short, to remain deeply human, even when everything around us seems to encourage the opposite.

Almost exactly a year from their comeback after a decade-long hiatus, which we featured and to which I refer you for more in-depth details, the Nice, France-based trio Contre Jour, started in 2009 (Fka Neptüne), made up of original band members Roxane Benassaya (Vocals) and Christophe Méoni (Bass, Synth, Programming), and Emmanuel D’Auzon (guitar), who joined in 2010, unveil their ninth DIY official videoclip for “This New World,” a song about words being used as weapons.

“THIS NEW WORLD” was born from a feeling that has become increasingly difficult to ignore: the feeling that our era is slowly reconnecting with ideas we believed had long been left behind. As though intolerance, the rejection of others, unapologetic violence, contempt for knowledge, the appeal of simplistic truths, and the preference for beliefs over facts were quietly reclaiming a central place in public discourse. As though some of history’s most painful lessons were fading before our eyes, without anyone seeming truly alarmed by it.

Reminiscent of the raw, icy post-punk sound of early Siouxsie and the Banshees, relentless rattling drum patterns and doom-laden murky bass throbs churn sonorously below harsh angular guitar, that scratches and jags the stretched surface with searing shards of screeching tones, layered with dire, melancholic synths, to stretch into a discordant edgy aura around sad, pain-filled female vocals, standing apart from the dishonour and vileness of “This New World.”

Ultimately, the contrasts throughout this video tell a simple story: remembering where we come from helps us understand what we are in the process of losing. Progress is never a straight line. It can move backwards too. And perhaps it is precisely in those moments that we realize growing older is not about becoming someone else, but finally understanding why that part of ourselves was always worth preserving.

Rather than use AI, the Official Videoclip by Contre Jour themselves reworks genuine archival footage, from the band’s optimistic and unconventional teenage years, through various analog processes to combine it with a present-day performance of “This New World” that is enhanced using video projection and extensive experimentation with an analogue oscilloscope. The result is a symbolic retro-futuristic vision containing dueling timelines that shift speed, clarity, and color before forming a strange, shapeshifting amalgamation that contains both.

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