Saviour – Enemies (New Music)

Oh Saviour, do we laugh or do we cry when it comes to “Enemies”? 🤡 The Perth band’s new single is their way of sharing news of their fourth album on the way: A Lunar Rose will be released independently (with the help of Believe Music) on the 28th February.

“Enemies” sees the band tilt their more recent grisly approach in music videos sideways, with the help from a determined clown in the Darkspirit music video. Hired by the band to “Make sure people buy your album” in a teaser video, the CLOWNHUB employee takes that promise to the extreme. He stalks a man (played by Make Them Suffer‘s Sean Harmanis) after watching him carelessly discard a CD of A Lunar Rose into a nearby bin (!). Sean is found in his car, rocking out to “Hollowed Heart”, before he’s kidnapped.

Implements of torture – manufactured by Fisher-Price perhaps – are used while Sean is forced to take in Saviour’s music. It’s hilariously done and pretty funny to imagine this kind of service in real life, including desperate musicians taping peoples’ eyelids open so they watch their music video.

Things turn darker toward the end of the video, where a blood splatter has those toy torture tools become real. It’s a twist of perception that makes sense of Sean’s horrified expressions throughout the experience. This part, to me, forms a link between the song and the video, even if it wasn’t deliberate.

The low and sparkless “Enemies” explores a suffocating existence through punishing instrumentation. Kept trapped and stuck by memories, and endlessly “Dreaming of what we could have been”, the idea of the un-real causing very real pain is contained within the song as well as what the clowning video presents.

“How do I fight this alone?”

What’s also relevant is that it’s human nature to turn away from the things we don’t want to see, and be lulled into a state of numbness about it, but when things are truly wrong, pain will keep pulling attention back to it, again and again. In a sense we’ll be tortured by our enemies/entities/anxieties until we look at them. But that’s not an easy task, and Saviour capture that here too.

With the contrasting voices of Bryant Best and Shontay Snow entwining, “Enemies” is a dance of being aimlessly lost and feeling frustration in being stuck. The call to “spend the rest of my life sleeping” is haunting, with the life-like enemies left to run wild in their mind.

A Lunar Rose is available for pre-order now via Artist First. The album will feature previous singles “The City” and “Never Sleep”. Watch “Enemies” below via YouTube, and keep an eye out for a familiar mask too.