“We definitely play with it. But it’s not as though we try to ram it down people’s throats. Kim [Moyes] and I are really old friends and we get into the studio and the camera comes out and we start getting bored with the usual photos. So we start hamming it up – playing around and being silly. Ultimately the t-shirts come off and we start throwing our arms around each other – and invariably they are the photos we love the best.”

So says Julian Hamilton, one half of Sydney-based electro wizards The Presets – perhaps the most homoerotic ‘straight’ Australian outfit since Silverchair. Indeed, the video for their latest single, ‘This Boy’s In Love’, features two shirtless boys wrestling, Greco-Roman style, in a pool of milky liquid. It’s aggressive, sensual and beautiful – almost classical, like a Rembrandt painting brought to life.

“We got so many treatments for that video from directors,” Julian tells MCV. “But they were all very typical – boy and girl running into the forest together, boy and girl running down the street or out of town together – and we thought ‘Oh God!’ Then finally that treatment came though and we were thrilled. But it’s homoerotic, definitely!

The Presets have a particular affinity with the gay community. Their first gigs were at sundry gay nights across Sydney.

“It was always the gay scene that really jumped on what we were doing before anyone else did, here and overseas,” Julian says. “The gay scene is the tastemaker I think – historically it has always been the gay scene that jumped on cool things before the mainstream.”

But now the mainstream is really following our lead. The Presets’ recently release second album, Apocalypso, debuted at Number 1 on the ARIA chart. With lead single ‘My People’, a not-so-hidden swipe at the Howard government’s immigration policies, already a club classic, ‘This Boy’s In Love’ is set to follow.

“We’re totally thrilled,” Julian raves. “If you had asked me six months earlier, I would never have dreamed of it even being in the charts.”

The Presets’ Apocalypso tour hits The Forum this weekend. Both shows are sold out. Apocalypso is in stores now. 

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