French producers The Blaze’s self-directed videos take on modern masculinity

It’s not often a music video is so gut-wrenchingly brilliant that you can’t get the thought of it from your head so instead you watch it again, and again, and again, but so it was when French music producers The Blaze completely floored us with their latest audio visual release Territory.

Although still firmly part of the underground with just two tracks released to date, the producer pair have already marked themselves out as ones to watch not only through their ability to make the kind of euphoric tracks that have you yearning for the heat only found on a sweaty dance floor at 2am, but for their conversation-halting self directed music videos.

In 2016, The Blaze released Virile which told the story of two male friends spending a night in a depressing living room of a could-be-anywhere block of flats. After smoking a spliff, the men dance their way across the carpeted room towards dawn. As their grip on reality loosens, inhibitions fall away: tops come off, they wrestle, hug and kiss their way into a dizzying state of all-out euphoria.

A year later, The Blaze have returned with Territory, taken from their soon-to-be-released EP of the same name, out 7 April. Filmed in Algiers with French production company Iconoclast, Territory tells the prodigal son tale of a young man returning home from an unnamed place abroad, tapping deep into themes of modern masculinity in the process.

The video opens with the camera focused on a boat’s trail marked out in bubbling foam on the surface of holiday-blue seawater. We cut to see a young man crying as he walks into a room packed with his family and friends. As his relative’s hands reach for his head to pull him close, the vocal begins “We’ve waited for this day/We’ve shed some tears of love.” Across the following scenes we see the man both together with and apart from his old friends as he watches them pray on the roof at sunrise and parties with them late into night.