Daiana Feuer on August 3rd, 2015

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Prayers’ rendition of “West End Girls” by the Pet Shop boys definitely brings out the grit in a song about inner-city life and class struggles. Leafar Seyer makes the lyrics his own, and the cycle of influence just adds another layer to the original synth-pop hit from the 1980s. The Pet Shop Boys’ Neil Tennant started working on this song while watching a gangster film at a friend’s house, then elaborated his lyrics taking a cue from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land,” and further cites Grandmaster Flash’s protest rap song “The Message” as inspiration for the driving bass line and socially conscious subject matter. Prayers grew up on Pet Shop Boys and live in a world where thugs, Latino culture and goth aesthetic have organically bridged together into a hybrid outsider identity. The new music video is very much about hanging out in a graveyard with witchy girls in San Diego, but the violence and alienation of street life is real, not fashion. The song comes off more as an anthem than a mere tribute to a favorite band. The band’s album “Young Gods” came out in June on Travis Barker’s LaSalle Records.

||| Watch: “West End Girls”