CITIZENS! - True Romance

What this video is

Released in September 2012 as the third single from CITIZENS!'s debut album Here We Are (Kitsuné, May 2012), 'True Romance' arrived at the peak of the London indie-dance wave that fused post-punk guitar songwriting with French electronic label sensibilities. The album was produced by Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand, cementing a trans-generational lineage from early-2000s post-punk revival to early-2010s danceable…

Why it matters

A defining artifact of early-2010s Kitsuné-style indie-dance: guitar-led songwriting with electronic sheen, married to high-concept, low-production-value video aesthetics that prioritised idea over spectacle. The video's documentary-vérité approach to a single conceptual premise (PDA in…

The director

Parisian directing duo Clément Durou and Pierre Dupaquier, who met at the Olivier de Serres art school in Paris. Both grew up in the Parisian suburbs and adopted the name 'We Are From L.A.' as a statement of their American pop-culture influences. Represented…