Hot gun, our promise bleeds
You would never stop looking for me
Have we left it all behind?
Is it lust that’s holding the line?
Intimacy becomes especially cruel once its gestures outlive the feeling that gave them meaning. A touch continues out of habit, desire reports for duty, and two people repeat the same private choreography while looking through each other as if they have never met. “Sex Machines,” the latest single from Dutch brothers Ruben and Matthijs Pol, occupies that bleakly comic interval, where lust keeps the body busy after the relationship has already vacated the premises.
Following a single launch show during Paris Fashion Week in June, Pol now give that estrangement a public face in the song’s official video, directed by fashion photographer and filmmaker Rémi Lamandé. The duo treats New Wave as a living language, bringing music, fashion, moving image, and performance into the same sharpened frame. Here, a lovers’ closed loop becomes a roving interview program whose strangers seem to know every private detail.
The song advances on twitching beats, serrated guitars, and clipped vocals, with each syllable inspected, stamped, and sent down the conveyor belt. Sparks supplies the arch pop theatre, while DEVO’s mechanized discipline tightens the arrangement into nervous obedience. Sigue Sigue Sputnik adds tabloid chrome and cheap-thrill futurism; Adam and the Ants lend the proceedings enough rouge, regalia, and heroic excess to turn emotional collapse into prime-time entertainment. Through it all, the robotic chant of “we are sex machines” passes from come-on to diagnosis.
Lamandé opens the video in daylight, where a striped-sleeved interviewer, Ruben Pol, carries a star-marked microphone through a narrow service alley. An elderly woman in a floral dress, a woman in pink, a muscled, semi-shirtless man wearing an enormous silver “S,” and several other passersby take their turns before the camera. They offer no opinions or explanations; instead, each stranger lip-syncs Pol’s account of physical appetite and emotional vacancy. Stark title cards and white-background close-ups give the sequence the air of a public-information broadcast commandeered by style and libido.
The assignment soon strays underground. The cast descends into a concrete parking garage, crowds the reporter, gathers around a car, and carries a cardboard placard commanding viewers to REPENT. Pol eventually perform before a packed room and a hard white backlight as the same faces press toward the handheld camera. What began as an orderly street interview becomes a collective compulsion, collapsing the distance between observer, participant, stranger, and former lover. A final outtake catches the brothers laughing together, briefly breaking the program’s immaculate pose.
“It started off with the idea of doing an interview style video with a diverse cast of characters,” the band explain. “We liked the idea of ‘strangers’ singing the song, similarly how the two ex-lovers in the lyrics are acting like strangers. We shared the idea with director Remi Lamandé who brought the full script to life.”
Watch the video for Sex Machines below:
“Sex Machines” is available through Bandcamp and other streaming platforms. Listen below, and order here.
Pol introduced their analogue-driven edge with a self-titled debut EP in 2023. The subsequent singles “Masks” and “The Chameleon” moved deeper into theatrical New Romantic territory, establishing the brothers as musicians whose presentation carries as much intent as the recordings themselves.
The duo oversees their visuals, videos, merchandise, and fanzines themselves. Their first zine, documenting a Western European tour, is stocked by the Paris bookshop Librairie 1909. That multidisciplinary practice has also led to sound-design collaborations with Louis Vuitton, Miu Miu, and others.
In early 2026, Pol opened sold-out Lebanon Hanover shows in London, Lille, and Paris. With “Sex Machines,” their private machinery has moved into public view, microphone extended and camera rolling, only to discover that the whole crowd already knows the refrain.
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