This Is Our Jam: Chromatics, “Kill For Love”

There’s a scene in Drive where Ryan Gosling’s character takes the movie’s love interest and her son on a scenic trip to the Los Angeles River. Dirty concrete banks and polluted water are reimagined as an idyllic fairy tale, with sunlight playing in the camera’s lens and reflecting off the muscle car hood; In a few minutes Ryan Gosling will be crushing his enemy’s hand with a hammer.

Like the film they recently contributed music to, Chromatics’ new single “Kill for Love,” fuses sex, drugs, and violence into an understated combination that is both disturbing and beautiful. “I drank the water and it felt alright / I took a pill almost every night,” sings Ruth Radelet, buoyed by pillowey minimal-wave synths. The track succeeds for the same reasons Johnny Jewel’s contributions to Drive were such a boon to the film’s soundtrack (he is also behind Glass Candy and Desire)—a penchant he shares with Nicholas Winding Refn for mixing the sexy and the disturbing into the same anhedonic tone poem. “Kill For Love” makes living dangerously seem blasé, and acting blasé look really really cool.