Right Hand Left Hand return to pulverise your ears with the first single from the long awaited Zone Rouge (available on 15 November via Bubblewrap Collective). Produced by Charlie Francis (Future of the Left, REM, Robyn Hitchcock) the album promises a tour of humanity’s contempt for itself and the Earth, each track visiting the site of a bloody atrocity, or act of environmental sadism, or sometimes both.
‘Prora’ takes us on a trip to Hitler’s abandoned holiday camp. A stark parade of brutalist high rises looming fortress-like out of the forested dunes of the Baltic coast, Prora predated similar developments in Greece and Spain by about twenty years and was intended as part of the Nazi programme of Strength through Joy, a chance for the Volk to have their bleak little fascist package holiday, to get some fresh air and purity away from the daily grind of establishing a thousand-year Reich. They never got their day at the beach. With the outbreak of the war, its 10,000 rooms were left to rot and were finally sold off to developers a few years ago. They’re turning it into luxury flats. Have a look on Airbnb. You can book your holibobs there. Nice, right?
The track ironically quotes the repetitive unsentimentally of the place’s architecture – built around a few simple loops that stretch into the distance, it wears the unexpectedly jaunty fixed grin of an authoritarian sun-seeker. ‘Prora’ could yet be the feel-good hit of the summer – seeing as our summers seem to end sometime in October, an ecological catastrophe rushing to envelop us. The dark utopian swagger quickly crumbles into something less ambivalent: “A totalitarian holiday / Brutalism on the beach / basic human decency / is kept out of reach“. It’s a righteous, furious little banger of a track.
‘Prora’ by Right Hand Left Hand is streaming now in all the usual places. Zone Rouge is available to preorder via Bandcamp.
