FADER PREMIERE
Paris five-piece The Aikiu really hit it with "Win," a fantastic, ’80s-via-2013 pop song featuring JD Samson, of Le Tigre and Men. The video's spellbinding, too, showcasing a ballet of semi trucks, which Alex Aikiu explains below. The band's The Win EP—complete with a remix they say is "influencée par Bad Boy Records"—is out now in France, and available elsewhere on December 10th via Atlas Chair Records.
The concept for 'Win' first came from my desire to work with the video director Nicolas Davenel, who directed the Birdy Nam Nam video 'Defiant Order,' which I love. He’s obsessed with machines, especially cars, motorcycles and the aesthetic and lifestyle of their aficionados. We finally ended up with the concept of customized semi-truck enthusiasts, but a la francaise. There's a sadness and strange beauty in these dehumanized spaces that Nicolas finds incredibly interesting, as well as a certain nostalgia that corresponds with the emotion of the song. We wanted to explore the theme of extreme mechanical fetishism, like John Carpenter in his film Christine, and the movie Duel, directed by Steven Spielberg, but modernized and transposed into the environment of semi-trucks using the trucks as a sort of alter ego of the driver, but while working within a very clean aesthetic. I wanna win with you becomes like a declaration of love to the machine itself.