To Love To Peace Today: Ooberfuse, Bethlehem’s Voice To All

When a song like To Love To Peace Today drops into my headphones, the usual streaming noise in the background goes quiet. This one was recorded in Bethlehem in December 2025 and released out of London just as peace talks, ceasefires and headlines feel like they hang by a thread. It comes from Ooberfuse, the alternative pop duo from Woolwich, and from a city of side streets, small bars and kitchen tables where people still argue, laugh and keep going.

Bethlehem, today, not a postcard

The track was cut inside Soul Bar, a small independent venue wedged into the daily life of Bethlehem. Guitars, an oud, keys, percussion, probably that mix of cigarette smoke, dust and hope you only find in places where music happens.

Local musicians stand shoulder to shoulder with Ooberfuse and Bethlehem artist Charlie Rishmawi. So the song arrives as a voice from the same streets where kids go to school, parents fight bills, and artists try to keep their craft alive between checkpoints and power cuts.

When I listen, I hear a dispatch rather than a slogan. A dove on the single artwork lifts itself from a cracked wall topped with barbed wire. And the title goes like fresh paint on broken concrete. To Love To Peace Today feels exactly like that image: fragile wings and cold concrete sharing the same frame.

Soul Bar: a small room with a long echo

Soul Bar has become a lifeline for the city’s musicians, a place where an oud line can lean into a synth pad and nobody looks twice. Instruments share a tiny stage. People share stories that seldom cross borders. Then Ooberfuse coming in with the clear idea that the song had to grow from that room outward. They listened first, tracked after. Peace turns from theory into something local and urgent when you stand in a place like that, with a mic in your hand and a window facing a wall.

The timing matters. The single arrives just before Peace Sunday and the World Day of Peace. Though the message keeps pushing past any calendar square. Because peace here is a daily grind, a job that never clocks out.

Hit play on the video below and let the room speak for itself. Listen for the grain of the local players, the air around the vocal, the way the rhythm section holds its ground. That is Bethlehem, today, talking in four minutes of music.

Ooberfuse: a straight cable from Woolwich to Bethlehem

Ooberfuse know how to smuggle a message across borders. They have dragged their cases through the UK, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Canada, the Philippines, China, India, Romania and Iraq, from favelas to festival stages and as far as the House of Lords. They have stepped onto the O2 in Greenwich, Leicester Square Theatre, London Palladium.

Support has come from BBC Radio 2, BBC Introducing, Music Week, Rolling Stone India, Guardian Music and DJ Mag. Impressive. And they have already shared releases with names like Snoop Dogg while backing campaigns around homelessness.

On this track they use all that road experience for something simple: connect London and Bethlehem through one straight cable and leave the gain high. To Love To Peace Today feels like a hand-written message smuggled through the cracks of a wall. Play the video, let Bethlehem into your day for a few minutes, and see what it does to your sense of distance.

Find Ooberfuse and To Love To Peace Today on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube – and keep an ear ready for Spotify on 16 January 2026. I’ll be around.