WL//WH Video Premiere: SMILE Gets Grimy and Trip Hop Inspired by a “Hot Friend” (Official Music Video)

WL//WH Video Premiere SMILE

Fresh from a slot at Groningen showcase festival Eurosonic last month, and having already chalked up live shows with the likes of Fontaines D.C, Squid, Psychotic Monks, Ditz, and Touché Amore, Cologne-based five-piece SMILE share the new cut “Hot Friend,” due out on 12th February via cult Austrian label Siluh Records (Laundromat Chicks, GARDENS).

The German-American Post Punk unit, made up of Rubee True Fegan (Vocals), Lars Fritzsche (Guitar), Sebastian Lessel (Guitar), Max Schmidt (Bass), and Marius Szarnych (Drums), tease tomorrow’s release of the ‘grimy trip-hop inspired’ track with the visuals, created by Rubee Fegan and the band themselves, WL//WH is pleased to premiere.

“Hot Friend” hails from the long nights on tour, where the hours between gigs blurred into a haze of restless energy. Feeling our live set lacked something to channel both its rage and sensuality, the idea for this track was born. Last summer, it took shape as a messy undertow driven by caustic, percussive guitars and a hypnotic groove.

“Hot Friend” lures the listener in with a seething, spectral slow build, rife with rugged tension and seductive sensuality, steadily stumbling on casual, shuffling drum patterns and sonorous bass pulses, under sultry spoken word female vocals, slowly rising into a nervous simmering cry, surrounded by vibrant twangy six-string reverberations and tweaking guitar scrapes, piercing and shivering into a distorted clanking dimension.

The lyrics sprung from poems passed back and forth between Rubee and dear friend and brilliant writer, Olivia Martinez. Engrossed in delirious, hot, dripping days in the desert, poems emerged of past heartbreak and the potential of new lust discharged from the pressure of performance and passivity. In November, we recorded it with Jan Philipp Janzen and Julian Stetter at the ONE artist studio in the Eifel, capturing that late-night tension in a single weekend.

The Original Music Video by Rubee Fegan and SMILE is shot in black and white and uses close-up, skewed angles and a shifting momentum to create a chaotic surreal vibe. A strange scarf-textured mask combines with suggestive postures and strobing lights to awaken the imagination into the sordid fantasy of the soundtrack.

SMILE‘s new single, “Hot Friend”, drops tomorrow, February 12, via Siluh Records. Check below for the forthcoming European Tour dates:

♦ February 14, 2025 – Ment Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia
♦ April 23, 2025 – Supersonic, Paris, France
♦ April 25, 2025 – Antipode, Rennes, France
♦ April 25, 2025 – Astrolabe, Orléans, France
♦ June 8, 2025 – Orange Blossom Special, Beverungen, Germany