CULTURE

Ashley Benson and Cara Delevingne Costar in a New Music Video for Her Smell

A real-life couple off-screen, bandmates on screen.

by Katherine Cusumano

Akergirls
Courtesy Bleecker Street

In addition to being a real-life couple, Ashley Benson and Cara Delevingne are also bandmates, in a way—at least as far as Alex Ross Perry’s new film, Her Smell, is concerned. (It appears, in fact, that Her Smell is how the two met; their first public sighting as a presumed couple came on the very day shooting wrapped.) In the film, Delevingne and Benson, as well as Dylan Gelula (best known as the bratty teen Xanthippe on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), play the trio comprising the Akergirls, a fictional grunge-ish girl group that Elisabeth Moss’s Becky Something, of the band Something She, takes under her wing. The film premieres this weekend, and to mark the occasion, the Akergirls have released their first music video, a pink-tinged, rooftop-set clip for their song “Can’t Wait.”

In the video, a bowl-cut Delevingne plays the drums; Benson is on guitar; and Gelula plays the bass. They all sing in close harmony, repeating, “Can’t wait around, can’t wait around, can’t wait around for you,” over and over. It sounds a bit like a Waxahatchee B side or, as one W editor put it, Vivian Girls—an appropriate reference, given the Vivian Girls are named for Henry Darger’s artistic inventions of the same name, while the Akergirls are named for the filmmaker Chantal Akerman.

This is not, of course, Delevingne’s first music video. The model turned actress has appeared in many a clip in the past, from the video for her song “I Feel Everything,” from Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, to “Bad Blood” to the Spencer Lee Band’s “River Water,” in which Delevingne plays a homeless drifter, to her most recent turn on the British producer Shy FX’s “Rudeboy Lovesong.” Elisabeth Moss, too, has starred in a couple of music videos—most recently for Brandi Carlile’s “Party of One”—so we’ll be awaiting the next release from Something She.

Related: Cara Delevingne Says Disney Princesses Led to Her Struggle With Sexuality