Honningbarna Swipe At ‘Penthouse Perfekt’ On New Single Featuring Haley Shea Of Sløtface

Photo: Tom Lund

With their new album imminent, the Norwegian punks recruit Haley Shea to take them into the digital dreamworld on high-octane new track.

01/12/2017
by Austin Maloney

When the sociopathic weirdos that run Silicon Valley aren’t ‘inventing’ things that don’t work or already exist, they often talk about rewiring humanity or uploading consciousness to the cloud, or in Elon Musk’s case, saving the world by digitising our brains. There’s a weird tech-god saviour-mentality idea to these things, people who’ve decided they can leave flawed humanity behind and step up and out of the real world onto another tech-created, plain.

Norwegian punks Honningbarna satirise ideas like these on their new single. ‘Penthouse Perfekt is about this boy and girl finding each other’, the band say, ‘but also contempt for everything weak, natural and human. They want to leave their flesh and become something more together. Penthouse perfection for the custom sweethearts’. Penthouse Perfekt undermines the idea by acting as a glossy brochure for it, hyping it up to the point where it sounds almost sarcastic, a boy and girl who take each other into the digital world, ‘out of the meat, and into something Utopian’ as the song says. But the addition of the couple to the narrative gives it a heart and depth: in a world as fucked as this one, who doesn’t fantasise about escaping it in some way? With the help of Sløtface‘s Haley Shea on vocals, it makes for a smart and thrilling punk-rock song, a roller-coaster ride of raw guitars and shoutalong vocals. And we’re delighted to premiere it for you here on NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION.

The band say:

We always want to be unpredictable, especially in a very boring music industry, so we wanted to make it a duet from a otherwise not very duetish band. Thank god Haley Shea from Sløtface agreed.

We had an idea about the music video being some sort of romantic-fascist-tacky-artificial travel through the minds of the young lovers, ending up in some fake-Nirvana, where they finally get what they want together. Love triumphs on green screen, after all. We also made a dancing routine because we like to tussle.

Check out Penthouse Perfekt below. Honningbarna’s new album Voldelig lyd is out on December 8th.