There is an aching heart at the centre of La Roux’s return to pop music after nearly seven years. Elly Jackson is now the solitary figure in what used to be a group, taking writing, production and performing credits on her fourth album. That singularity is reflected in the personal circumstances that drove the writing of the songs on this album, for she has freely admitted Old Flames is her response to the end of a 17-year relationship.
Intriguingly, her candid quote in the press release states that “It’s a farewell to that way of behaving in love and life. And in music too,” implying her next move could be a dramatic about-turn. She is certainly capable of stylistic upheaval, for she has mastered the art of the soft pop sad banger, sidling up alongside Robyn as one of its masters.
Category: synth-pop
Brixton’s The Windmill is easily the most discussed music venue of the decade. Its 150-capacity room nurtured an eccentric art rock community, birthing now-renowned acts Black Country, New Road, Black Midi and the Last Dinner Party. It sparked a wave of jazzy, multi-instrumentalist musicians worldwide, from English Teacher (Leeds) to Geese (New York) to Hesse Kassel (Santiago, Chile).
HMLTD were among the first artists from the venue to gain attention, before the press had even decided the Windmill was South London’s supposed hub of eclecticism. While their contemporaries performed brooding music, donning drab, working-class garb for post-punk credibility, HMLTD stood out like a sore thumb with their multicoloured, aristocratic glam…
Timeless, and yet always fresh: utterly oblivious of any wiles of the pop business, Planet Yello has been turning on its orbit for nearly fifty years, plunging us into a world where past and future are one and James Bond joins forces with the Man in the Moon, Dionysos and Philip K. Dick. “To the future, through the past,” declares Dieter Meier. With their fifteenth studio album Time Lab, Dieter Meier and Boris Blank put this maxim into practice more than ever.
Blank constructs his imaginary soundtracks from a combination of freshly minted samples and a deep dip into his archive, which in the course of nearly fifty years of incessant creativity has accumulated innumerable song fragments, riffs and motifs. Meier then arrives to uncover the tales of anarchic romance, absurd robberies…
Halloween and Clinic were made for each other – and this year there is a double celebration as the Liverpool band release their first album in five years. Now down to a duo comprising founder members Ade Blackburn and Jonathan Hartley, the masked band have always stood a distance apart from their contemporaries, dodging the spotlight while wearing their surgical masks, which were in place well before the pandemic.
Yet pigeonholing them is a mistake, for Clinic have always toyed with expectations, at their happiest exploring the macabre language of reverberant psychedelic pop and adding unpredictable, stylistic about turns.
Wild in the Streets finds them on strong form, reflecting Blackburn’s recent musical…
…Remastered from the original master tapes by longtime Sparks engineer Bill Inglot, expanded edition includes the 9 original tracks alongside 17 bonus tracks featuring rare remixes, alternate versions, and previously unreleased demos.
The third and mercifully last of Sparks’ mid-’80s dance pop albums, the frankly disappointing Music That You Can Dance To delivered just two standouts: a remake of Russell Mael’s European “Modesty Blaise” 45 and the epic 1985 single “Change” (replaced on British pressings by “Armies of the Night”). Indeed, “Change” isn’t merely the album’s most provocative number; it ranks among the duo’s finest performances of all time, a shifting soundscape of sonics and moods through which Russell Mael’s ruminations on…
The Art of Space Disco (1977-1978) presents Space’s most iconic tracks and sums up two fruitful intense years of musical innovation.
The French synth-pop band Space had international hits with their 1977 dance numbers “Carry on Turn Me On” and “Magic Fly,” leading to a deal with Casablanca Records and gold records for the band’s songwriter and leader Didier Marouani. The dance group was formed by keyboardist Marouani in 1977. The group’s biggest international success came later that year with the previously mentioned singles, both appearing on charts in a number of countries. Space toured and recorded for the next few years and continued to make well-received records, although no singles duplicated the success of “Magic Fly.”
A man from the future is an audio/musical biography of computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing written by Pet Shop Boys with Turing biographer Professor Andrew Hodges.
…The duo originally wrote the songs with Hodges around 2012–2013, later performing it with the BBC Concert Orchestra at a BBC Prom in July 2014. They later decided to revise the piece to “give it more of an electronic emphasis”, and Sven Helbig, the original orchestrator, suggested reworking his orchestrations in a more intimate arrangement for eight string players. The band said about the album, “Our motive in creating this work was to make a musical memorial to Alan Turing who gave so much to his country and the world and was rewarded for it by being prosecuted…
Affection, issued in 2024, trailed the first proper Bullion LP by eight years, making the 2026 follow-up Nearly rather unexpected. Its arrival was likely closer to a shock for those who track Nathan Jenkins’ behind-the-scenes activities. During the two-year interim, Katy J Pearson, Meg Mac, and Avalon Emerson released albums co-written and/or produced by Jenkins, who concurrently had a hand in songs by Oliver Sim and “Rare” duet partner Carly Rae Jepsen, and also mixed an album by Orlando Weeks. All of this outside work perhaps inspired Jenkins’ more openly collaborative approach – akin to that of a production job – yet Nearly comes out sounding just like a Bullion project. While bearing some strong resemblances to Jenkins’ most commercially successful productions…
With the passing of Dave Ball last autumn, one of the 1980s’ great synth-pop outfits came to an end. He and Soft Cell partner Marc Almond completed the final mix of Danceteria two days before Ball died. It’s the full stop on the band and, fittingly, a concept album about early 1980s New York, where the duo indulged in hedonistic 24-hour nightclubbing which they filtered into darkly peerless electronic music, giving Britain a glimpse of what lay in its 1990s future.
Danceteria is, then, a celebration of long-ago dissolution, the glamour and sleaze of a city that no longer exists. Tonally, it’s similar to Madonna’s most recent album; indeed, she receives a mention on the moodily pulsing title track, an inventory of the 21st Street clubbing mecca.
Get Mean is the third official studio album from cult darkwave duo Boy Harsher, marking their debut for major-label Atlantic. Active for over a decade, the pair have largely stuck to their signature sound of danceable gloom, with minimal beats and shadowy vocals dramatically expressing themes of pain and lust (to name two of their most popular songs). They haven’t drastically altered their style with the switch to a major label, as they’ve been gradually incorporating more ’80s pop influences into their music, making it no surprise that Get Mean sounds a bit brighter and more accessible than their past work.
A more significant change is the fact that members Jae Matthews and Augustus Muller split up as a romantic couple in 2024, leaving them…
With her 2023 album Love as Projection, Frankie Rose pushed the electronic elements that had been hanging out quietly in the background of her songs all the way into the spotlight. Rose’s music already had a dense and evolving history by then, with time spent laying the foundation for a certain era of indie rock with her work in Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and her own reverb-heavy guitar pop in the late aughts and 2010s, and solo work that grew increasingly more synthetic with each new album. Hila continues the complete dive into electronic pop that manifested on Love as Projection, but takes Rose’s digital sound to places that are darker and more abstract. The gorgeous “Can’t Be Wrong” layers synth melodies over a steady pulse, with thick, strutting bass and Rose’s…
The CD features the full concert remixed and remastered from the original multi-track master tapes and restored to its original running order and released for the very first time.
Includes live versions of the hit singles ‘New Song’, ‘What Is Love?’, ‘Hide And Seek’, ‘Pearl In The Shell’ and ‘Like To Get To Know You Well’ plus Howard’s previously unreleased version of the Xmas favourite ‘Ding Dong Merrily On High’, sung to the backbeat of his hit single ‘New Song’.
This ‘restored’ live in concert performance by Howard Jones is being released on DVD for the first time.
Also includes a version of the track ‘Human’s Lib’ featuring Howard’s full spoken introduction entitled ‘The Story Of Ruth, David and Dennis’.
Guava Girl Summer is so 2025. The era of the “Chaotic Princess” is now. So reads the gospel according to Marci, whose rhinestone-crusted new album Mask Lady and Late Night Girl flicks through the glossy pages of power pop and soft rock with quips about getting baked at sunrise, chatting on the landline, falling on your knees, and making the devil cry. Co-written and produced with her TOPS bandmate David Carriere, Marta Cikojevic’s second LP reprises the disco-speckled all-or-nothingness of 2022’s eponymous debut, serving up a platter of glittery hooks and golden grooves styled with unashamedly retro trimmings.
Marci sounds like the name of the hot next-door neighbor in a John Candy film, but on this semi-autobiographical record, the Montreal…
…includes 9 bonus tracks of ‘Midnight Versions’ and rarities.
Marius Lauber’s debut album is in itself a feat of many surprises. The Cologne, Germany-based artist, who records and produces under the moniker Roosevelt, takes measures to make sure that this initial self-titled offering feels far from conventional, yet remains accessible to those who crave new sounds.
Upon first listen of the self-titled debut, Roosevelt’s origin should not surprise many diehards of electronic music, as the genre is very much rooted in the land of the Rhine, with forerunners of synthpop such as Kraftwerk and Neu! both hailing from the country. Roosevelt takes what made those early electro artists special and…
Black Marble has always had a core of melodic brilliance, and each album has peeled away another layer of glum obfuscation. The earliest releases were cavernous and lo-fi, their harsh sound showing reverence to the coldwave revival of the 2010s that helped inspire Black Marble mastermind Chris Stewart to launch the project. Fifth studio album Life in Small Spaces still has smudges of the tape hiss and analog glow of the project’s roots, but there’s a new vibrancy which has been creeping slowly into the sound for years and seems to fully arrive with these songs.
Opening track “It Always Comes to Me” is almost shockingly unlike the Black Marble of the past, with snappy, live-sounding drums and bright, chorus-coated guitars front and center.
Most artists will say their music is shaped by their environment, but for London trio Night Tapes, it’s nothing short of fundamental. portals//polarities’ is a deeply immersive journey that travels through the places and sounds of its creation across the globe. From a bubbling swamp in Tallinn, Estonia, to birdsong in Mexico and even a Los Angeles police helicopter, this debut boasts a wildly exploratory soundscape. Made quietly in a shared South London house – where Iiris Vesik, Max Doohan and Sam Richards had to keep volume low to avoid disturbing neighbours – these songs are time capsules of the band’s experiences, both direct and indirect. Take ‘pacifico’ – a trip-hop-tinged nod to a mythical mindset inspired by stories of Mexico’s San Jose del Pacifico, with…
…Recorded between 1988 and 1989 in a small 8-track home studio in Amman, Jordan, Pieces of a Dream captures a side of the Arab music scene rarely documented: a group of musicians deeply inspired by jazz, soul, yacht rock and city pop, creating music that sounds closer to late-night LA or London than what most would associate with Jordan at the time.
Nechazz was formed by Palestinian-Jordanian musician Basim Said & Khaldoon Nasser and Iraqi singer and guitarist Kassim Sabounchi. While the trio became locally known for their live shows at the iconic Amman club Rumours, the music they wrote and recorded together was never officially released and remained unheard even among friends and family of the band.
Avon’s lesser-hailed, glam ‘80s synth-pop and new wave movement is spotlighted in-depth via 20 songs compiled by studio engineer Dave Massey, who smartly portrays the breadth and quality of an ‘80s blindspot.
The Bristol & Bath Blitz Club Meets Art School Sound – 80’s Explosion traces the reverberating influence of Rusty Egan and co.’s new wave crucible, The Blitz Club, along the M4 leyline, where it met Avon art school kids advancing from punk and funk into a new decade. Egan’s signature DJ brew – e.g. Kraftwerk to Visage, Burundi Black to Bowie, Japan and Grace Jones – would spark myriad emulators who were also mirroring the chops of Duran Duran (sons of the Brum club scene an hour north) and the likes of Martyn Ware…