Starbenders’ new music video for “Push” dives into a flashy dystopian future where a totalitarian regime uses AI robots to keep society mindless and loveless. 

The track itself is a sultry love song, with a trip-hop beat and intimate, dreamy vocals. It stays true to the band’s rock roots while successfully paying tribute to a different classic genre. 

The music video, however, takes that to another level entirely by creating an entire fictional world to immerse yourself in; yet despite the shiny neon signs and the “fashionable” vinyl bodysuits, it’s not a place you’d want to stay long. 

You see, this shiny hellscape is under constant government surveillance–signs flash “WE SERVE WE PROTECT WE CARE”–and the people that live there all wear masks under constant darkness. Fascism and climate change ended the world as we know it and replaced it with a reality where people are begging in the streets for Oxygen. 

In the midst of all this, however, there is hope. A man in blue spray paints a love potion on the wall (a nod to the name of the album, Love Potions) and is noticed by a woman in pink on the other side of the road. He feels her eyes on him and he turns to meet her gaze. As they begin to reach towards each other, the world falls away and they enter a virtual reality where it’s just the two of them, laid bare, stretching across as chasm to be together against all odds. They both take a leap of faith as they step away from steady ground towards each other and become one. As this happens, a drone cop evaluates them as a “potential threat” and approaches. 

Now, during the climax of the song and video, Starbenders’ frontwoman Kimi references the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, singing, “…for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die… and she ate” as the drone blasts the man and the woman apart, murdering them. The video comes to an end as they hold each other in the virtual reality, their essences slipping away but their love remaining. 

Love is all-powerful; love is radical. It cannot be stopped, nor can it be ended by force. That’s why it’s a threat to the powers that be, and why we must hold onto it. It’s so precious that even one second of it is worth any consequence, as our protagonists knew well. 

In the end, pain is temporary but love remains. 

You can stream Starbenders’ critically acclaimed album Love Potions out now.