You know that feeling when you’re staring at nothing in a club at 8 PM, the flashing lights painting everything in rose-tinted regret, and suddenly a song makes your heartbreak feel aesthetic? That’s the shared love language of Videoclub and TV Girl, two bands separated by oceans but connected by the same melancholic internet corner.
One sings in French, the other in irony. One soundtracks first kisses, the other soundtracks emotional detachment. Yet both belong to that specific subculture where love feels like a movie montage, heartbreak feels cinematic, and everything sounds like it’s been run through a VHS filter.
This article was born out of a visual déjà vu. The pastel melancholy of Videoclub’s Euphories album cover and the muted retro aesthetic of TV Girl’s Who Really Cares look like long-lost twins, one French, one American. Both capture the same pretty sadness energy: washed-out colours, and faces that look like they’ve just realised love isn’t forever but at least it’s photogenic. Those covers alone felt like a thesis statement for how both bands have built entire worlds out of heartbreak that’s as cinematic as it is sincere.
Videoclub is what happens when pastel innocence meets heartbreak. TV Girl is what happens when sarcasm meets longing.
Together, they’ve become the soundtrack of our generation’s most poetic identity crisis, romantic but detached, sincere but self-aware, nostalgic but terminally online.
The artists behind the feeling.
Videoclub was the French duo of Adèle Castillon and Matthieu Reynaud, two teenagers who looked like they’d stepped straight out of a Wes Anderson frame. Their breakout hit Amour Plastique was a love letter wrapped in synth-pop glitter. They were young, wildly in love, and so visibly French about it: soft glances, film grain filters, heartbreak that looked pretty. When they broke up, the band dissolved too, leaving behind Euphories, an album that now feels like a time capsule of what love used to sound like before irony got involved.
TV Girl, on the other hand, is an American indie band fronted by Brad Petering. Their music is a collage of snippets from old films, samples from forgotten radio shows, and lyrics that sound like someone narrating your heartbreak while scrolling through your texts. Albums like French Exit and Who Really Cares are full of smoky cynicism, catchy beats, and emotional detachment that somehow still hurts.
Videoclub is the sound of pastel hearts breaking softly. TV Girl is the sound of what happens when you stop believing in love stories but still keep writing them anyway.
The internet’s obsession with aesthetic heartbreak.
Somewhere between Tumblr moodboards and Reels, heartbreak became content. Both these artists became the faces of digital nostalgia. Videoclub and TV Girl don’t just make songs, they make vibes.
TikTok turned them into emotional subgenres. Videoclub is soft-girl sadness, the kind where you stare out of your hostel window during monsoon and pretend you’re in a French short film. TV Girl is sad boi satire, the kind where you post a meme about being dead inside and call it self-awareness.
Search “TV Girl” on Instagram Reels and you’ll find 200k clips of people lip-syncing to Lovers Rock while wearing eyeliner that’s seen better days. Search Amour Plastique and you’ll find cinematic edits of people spinning in slow motion under fairy lights.
Both bands tap into the same truth: Gen Z doesn’t just want to feel things, we want to aestheticise them. We want heartbreak that looks good on camera. We want sadness with a Spotify filter. We want to cry, but like, cutely.
The internet took their songs and turned them into emotional templates. You don’t just listen to Amour Plastique, you perform it. You don’t just relate to Not Allowed, you post it on your story at 3 AM with a caption that reads “idk this song just gets me.”
If Videoclub feels like falling in love in a European coming-of-age film, TV Girl feels like falling out of love while watching yourself do it.
Videoclub and TV Girl’s love philosophies.
Here’s where the split-screen really shows.
TV Girl writes from the aftermath: all the bitterness, detachment, and disillusionment that comes with realising love isn’t as cinematic as you thought. It’s witty and cruel, like a breakup text you’d screenshot and send to your best friend with “how could he say that???” Songs like Cigarettes out the Window and Lovers Rock are practically therapy sessions for the emotionally unavailable. They make you feel like heartbreak is inevitable, so you might as well be ironic about it.
Videoclub, on the other hand, writes from the before. Their music feels like the moment before the heartbreak, dreamy, hopeful, messy in the way first love always is. En nuit isn’t ironic. It’s earnest. It’s the sound of believing that love, no matter how doomed, is still worth writing about.
If TV Girl sounds like someone smoking outside your ex’s house, Videoclub sounds like someone writing their first love letter in cursive.
TV Girl says, “I’ve seen this movie before.”
Videoclub says, “I still believe in the ending.”
And maybe that’s why both have a chokehold on us, because deep down, we’re both. We want to be detached enough to laugh at heartbreak, but still soft enough to believe it means something.
The nostalgia paradox.
Here’s the paradox of our generation: we’re nostalgic for a past we never lived.
Videoclub and TV Girl give us that illusion, the vintage, grainy, 80s heartbreak aesthetic. They make us feel like we’re in a time when love letters were handwritten and people danced in slow motion instead of DM’ing.
We romanticise what we’ve never experienced because it feels safer than what we have. It’s not real nostalgia. It’s emotional escapism.
These artists let us borrow emotions from another era. Their retro sounds and cinematic visuals remind us that love can still be something beautiful, even if it’s filtered through heartbreak, even if it’s all pretend.
It’s why Euphories and Who Really Cares sit side by side in so many playlists. Because both remind us that even when love is gone, its echo still sounds beautiful.
So what does this say about us?
Maybe Videoclub is the French TV Girl. Or maybe they’re both just telling the same story in different accents.
Because that’s what Gen Z does best: we remix. We take old sounds, old aesthetics, old heartbreaks, and make them our own. We crave connection, but only if it looks cinematic. We want love to mean something, but we also want it to look good on tape.
Whether you’re the French soft lover or the Californian cynic, both artists mirror how our generation loves: self-aware, sentimental, and always soundtracking it like a film.
So yeah, maybe Videoclub is the French TV Girl.
Or maybe, we’re all just bilingual in heartbreak.
Read more at Her Campus at MUJ, your go-to corner for chaotic pop-culture dissections and soft heartbreaks wrapped in synths. Written by Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, the Barbie-coded engineer who codes by day, cries to lo-fi by night, and knows that heartbreak, in any language, always sounds better on vinyl.