"I've been a romantic for so long / All I've ever heard are love songs," sings Romy Madley Croft, with an audible sigh. In a long catalog of wistful love songs, The xx's "I Dare You" pulses like a heartbeat seeing a crush from across the room. It's a feeling conveyed in the trio's new video directed by Alasdair McLellan in collaboration with Belgian designer Raf Simons.
Starring Millie Bobby Brown (Stranger Things) and Ashton Sanders (Moonlight, The Retrieval), among others, "I Dare You" unfolds like a Sofia Coppola film — a missed bus, an older sister caught trying to skip school, Brown tagging along and, surrounded by "older kids" dancing to The xx, not quite ready (but wanting) to grasp teenage love. The band calls it "our love letter to Los Angeles, a city close to our hearts, where we wrote and recorded parts of our album I See You."
I See You is out now.
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