Mouth Season

The video for Booka Shade’s "Love Inc" is just people kissing. Aggressively, hungrily, like they’ve been separated for months and have exactly this one window. Mouths pressing together in the particular way that’s less about tenderness than about not being alone anymore. Watching it in October feels almost cruel.

Booka Shade—the Frankfurt electronic duo of Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier—have always made music that’s more melancholic than the tempo suggests. "Love Inc" follows that template: propulsive, club-functional, but with an undertow. The kind of track that sounds like an answer to a question you weren’t ready to ask.

Autumn does something specific to desire. The light changes and suddenly everyone you see on the street looks like someone you should have stayed with longer. The video knows this and leans into it—the kissing isn’t romantic in any soft sense, it’s urgent and slightly desperate, which is exactly the right register for a track like this. You watch it and think: I should be somewhere where this song is playing. I should have someone to kiss who kisses like that.

Maybe that’s the point of a good music video. Not to illustrate the song but to make you want to be inside it.