Personal Trainer have shared a new single, “What’s Left,” alongside a new video. The track will be available on DSPs tomorrow (July 29). It follows the Philadelphia- and Brooklyn-based trio’s debut single from back in February, “Backyard,” and showcases a punkier side of the indie rock outfit.
Between whirring guitars and vocal harmonies bursting with personality, the band asks “What’s left after lust,” exploring and challenging the tensions within “conventional” relationships and proudly staking out a place for pleasure, without sacrificing intimacy.
The band provided the following statement on the song:
Do you believe in Life After Love? Only this time, we want to know do you believe in Life After Lust? For Personal Trainer, the question challenges us to attempt to understand human sexuality on a deeper level. What is the difference between romantic and platonic partnership? Between love and lust? Between sex and intimacy? What does it look like to try and map these borders? While ‘lust’ may be a fickle and shallow emotion, its drives us in powerful ways — towards danger, towards mistakes, towards romance, and ironically… towards the banality of a domestic partnership. And once inside of those relationships, we are told that true intimacy only exists if coupled with a youthful eroticism. Simply put, attraction = love. And that when the lust fades, love has been lost. But is that true? ‘What’s Left’ demands that we interrogate these assumptions head on. It questions the cultural norms that shame feminine desire outside of monogamous relationships. It rants against the idea that once we ‘finally’ do find that relationship, that it’s integrity will be measured by the presence of consistent and consistently ‘hot’ sex. It challenges the strict boundaries between platonic intimacy and romantic relationships. We know lust fades, but we also know that pleasure doesn’t have to. Personal Trainer sees the rediscovery of pleasure as a radical act of resistance against the male gaze. As female-bodied adolescents, many of us learned how to have sex through movies, porn, and other content developed by and for men. The patriarchal culture created the lens through which most women understood what sex and intimacy were supposed to look like. But this lens only told one story. Especially when lust fades, we are called to play a more active role in creating pleasure for our partners and ourselves. The line, “Let me show you”, is a call to exchange ideas and methods, to regain control over our own experience of pleasure, and to reestablish the collaborative nature of its discovery. In the process, we may find that ‘sex’ is an ambiguous, flexible terms that only represents one manner of intimacy; that a deeper intimacy is one defined by exploration rather than objectification; and that rather than needing to fix something that is ‘broken’, we need only remember what was there before. Join us.
Watch the video for “What’s Left” below.
