Video:The Courtesans - 'Genius'.

Who: Sinead La Bella (vocals), Saffire Sanchez (guitar), Agnes Jones (bass), Victoria Brown  (drums) are the femme fatales that make up London-based, doom-pop meets electro-rock four-piece, The Courtesans.  

About the song: ‘Genius’ is the band's liberating debut single, "pushing the boundaries of force-fed views, of rules and labels". It features a potent mix of dark seductive choruses, otherworldly vocals, sparse,  sporadic,foreboding drum beats, and  jagged guitar hooks. The track has a strong Gothic vibe that takes on the form of a predator, slowly hunting and haunting, growing and evolving, before devouring its prey. 

About the video: "This hard-hitting video considers the never-ending, unattainable portrayal of ‘the perfect woman’. With unavoidable advertising and mounting social pressure from both sexes, we too often witness childhoods ending all too early in favour of cheap lipstick and chicken-fillet bras as young women rise to the bait of their own growing insecurities overtly and subliminally governed by outside sources.

Beyond this, we find the anti-ageing army of surgery toters, trading botox and collagen injections that prey on the insecure and the vulnerable. Slimming pills, eating disorders, false hair, false nails, false person, false life. To conform is never enough for as we are judged and criticised for our differences and shortfalls so too are we judged and criticised for owning a beautiful face or a curvaceous body.

The clip sees the band - four overtly-individual heroines - being burned at the stake for refusing to sacrifice their own opinions of how beauty should be perceived and how this should remain the property and under the control of the individual. Covering tattoos with skin-coloured paint does not alter the truth of what lies beneath the paint and indeed beneath the skin. You should not be crucified for simply wanting to just be...you."

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