Nobody plans to meet their future music video director on the tube at midnight with a guitar case in their face. But that’s how Die Twice met Milo Hume, the director behind Geese‘s Au Pays du Cocaine, and Cold has the exclusive first look at what came out of it. “They had all these amps and cases and shit falling all over the place,” he says. “It was a total mess.” They got talking, and Hume was invited down to Brighton for the next one.
“Me and some friends go down, see the show, it’s loud and great, and then spend the rest of the night running around the band’s house in a euphoric delirium,” he says. “The sun rose, we came to our senses and got the hell outta there, took a dip in the December frigid ocean to cleanse, and it really all felt like a dream, or a music video.” It was the kind of night he knew he wouldn’t forget, but didn’t expect to revisit quite so soon, and so he moved on.
Months later, Die Twice’s Olly Bayton, Billy Twamley, Finn Lloyd, and Jake Coles, who are a band that started through their own chance encounters in Exeter and have spent the last year selling out rooms in Brighton entirely on their own terms, asked Hume to make the video for Jalapeño.
“I’m listening to the song over and over, going through my archive of images, certain things started to stick,” he says. “Knights, bees – a nod to the Blind Melon No Rain video which has been in my head since I was like 14 – a narrative comes together of a guy stumbling through a dark madhouse and escaping to the ocean.” He pitched it to the band and they pointed out that he’d just described the night in Brighton. “I was just recreating the night we all had some months earlier. We laughed, and then we were off to the races.”
The video is shot in near total darkness, faces pulled out of black rooms by a single harsh white light that blows out half the frame. There’s a pink paper crown that looks cheap or the kind you’d pull from a Christmas cracker which stays for the duration and eventually makes it into the ocean. The armour scenes are overexposed almost entirely, two people in medieval kit dissolving into white. It looks like it was shot on something that might fall apart if you looked at it wrong.
“I was forcing them all into horrible uncomfortable situations,” Hume says. “They did take after take without complaining, gave it their all – you can see it in the footage. That’s real pain.” His favourite shot is one most people will miss entirely. “I love those fucking seagulls – there’s a half second where it’s just wings flapping at the bottom of the frame.”
Die Twice and Geese are exactly the kind of artists Hume is drawn to. “I’m attracted to artists who are experimenting with their sound, trying out uncomfortable ideas – it lets me do the same when I make visuals. It should always be uncertain, it should always be fun. I don’t want to be comfortable.” He has new work coming for a string of NYC artists he says will surprise people, though he’s keeping details close for now.
Die Twice’s debut EP Accept Me Like A Lie came out earlier this month via FAE. UK dates follow through the summer in London, Manchester, Bristol, and Brighton.
“That first night I spent with them certainly wasn’t comfortable,” Hume says. “But you can be absolutely sure it was fun.”