Love makes puppets out of proud people every day. Hypocrite, from Los Angeles darkwave duo Black Hall, rolls in like trouble with its collar up, all cool chrome nerves and bad intentions, and the new video for the song gives that trouble a highway, a heat haze, and a face you can’t quite trust. It’s a pop song that carries poison in its pocket. Tanner Dean and Errol Kern have built a machine for romantic ruin here, and in the new clip, they drive it straight into the open desert.
The song has a taut, Motorik shove, with Dean’s drums landing in clean, regular blows, as if some stern little factory in his chest has taken over the job of feeling. The synth line slices across the arrangement with a lean, mean glamour, while the bass keeps tugging everything forward like a hand at the small of your back. Dean sings with a bruised, bitter calm that makes the accusation sting harder. He sounds less like a man pleading his case than somebody standing in the ashes, kicking through what’s left and naming each burned thing one by one. Romance can rot with style.
The video keeps the frame split between stark black-and-white desert travel and color-soaked Lynchian visions of a mystery woman who seems to hover over the action like a curse, a fantasy, or maybe the boss of both. The van moves through the barren expanse like a hearse for old illusions, while those flashes of her world arrive lush, charged, and dangerous.
You start wondering whether she is a memory, a mirage, or a magician, whether the route was ever theirs to choose. The suggestion of black magick works because the song already deals in betrayal, projection, and the ugly little lies people tell while staring straight into somebody else’s face.
Watch the video for Hypocrite below:
Black Hall pulls off a stylish, sly piece of pop melodrama with gasoline in its blood. Hypocrite struts, smolders, and side-eyes its own damage, then leaves you out on that endless road, wondering who cast the spell first.
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