A coming out, a honeymoon cut short by a diagnosis and a song for two friends: the new Hercules & Love Affair release

Hercules & Love Affair are completing Danseur — a release built not out of club moods but out of queer stories. The first half came out in July; the second, another four tracks, arrives on 10 September. The label calls it a tribute to the very stories the project has been built on from the start.

The video for My Journey, the track that opens the release, was posted by the label Stratasonic Records on its own channel.

Every track is a story of its own. My Journey is about coming out. The Eyes of Love is about two men who found each other and whose honeymoon was cut short by the shadow of HIV; Butler says the story comes from his own life. I Get High is about the partners of transgender and non-binary people.

A song written for two women

The second part opens with Pirouette, which came out as a separate single at the end of August. The label’s materials say the song is dedicated to two women: SOPHIE, a long-time friend of Faris Badwan, and Aérea Negrot, who sang on two Hercules & Love Affair albums — Blue Songs and The Feast of the Broken Heart.

The same materials say the two women died “a few months apart”. That is not the case, and the error has already spread through the media. SOPHIE died in Athens on 30 January 2021; Aérea Negrot died in Berlin on 11 October 2023, at the age of forty-three. Two years and eight months lie between the two dates.

“This song is about what I consider one of the last frontiers of LGBT rights,” said Andy Butler about I Get High, explaining that he meant support for the romantic partners of transgender and non-binary people.

The video for My Journey was directed by Miguel Rodriguez. Three performers appear on screen — Stephen Smith, Kaleb "KABO" Jacobs and Leandra Atenea Levine Hidalgo — and the story itself rests on four states: recognition, transformation, uncertainty and the search for oneself.

Andy Butler put the project together in 2004, and from the outset it has been not a band with a fixed line-up but a collective that changes from release to release. The debut album came out in 2008 on DFA, with Kim Ann Foxman on vocals; that was the record that made the project’s name.

Why this release is different

Butler used to talk about himself in hints rather than plainly, and he put it this way himself: he is gay, he grew up with a struggle of his own, and that is exactly why he has something to say. Danseur is the first time he has laid it all out as specific stories rather than as a mood.

Butler did not make the record alone: two other people stand behind it — Elín Ey, who sings as Hips & Lips, and Quinn Whalley of Paranoid London. The same line-up was behind their previous work together, and what drew them to each other, according to the label, was a shared love of acid house, disco and darker sounds.

The second part of Danseur arrives on 10 September: alongside Pirouette it brings Heaven — also with Faris Badwan — Night on the Town and Flip Flop.

Earlier we reported how the queer festival WHOLE went beyond Europe for the first time and announced the line-up of its Brazilian edition — the other side of the same scene.